CONTENTS

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

David Lodge (CBE)’s novels include Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work (shortlisted for the Booker) and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages.

He is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham, a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, and is a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

ABOUT THE BOOK

David Lodge’s frank and illuminating memoir about the years where he found great success as a novelist and critic.

Luck plays an important part in the careers of writers. In this book David Lodge explores how his work was inspired and affected by unpredictable events in his life.

In 1976 Lodge was pursuing a ‘twin-track career’ as novelist and academic. As a literary critic, he made serious contributions to the subject, before carnivalising it in his comic-satiric novel Small World. The balancing act between his two professions was increasingly difficult to maintain, and he became a full-time writer just before he published his bestselling novel Nice Work. Both books were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, in which he was later involved as Chairman of the judges.

Readers of Lodge’s novels will be fascinated by the insights this book gives – not only into his professional career but also more personal experience. The main focus, however, is on writing as a vocation. Anyone who is interested in learning about the creative process, about the dual nature of the novel as both work of art and commodity, will find Writer’s Luck a candid and entertaining guide.

Also by David Lodge

FICTION

The Picturegoers

Ginger, You’re Barmy

The British Museum is Falling Down

Out of the Shelter

Changing Places

How Far Can You Go?

Small World

Nice Work

Paradise News

Therapy

Home Truths

Thinks …

Author, Author

Deaf Sentence

A Man of Parts

The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up and Other Stories

CRITICISM

Language of Fiction

The Novelist at the Crossroads

The Modes of Modern Writing

Working with Structuralism

After Bakhtin

ESSAYS

Write On

The Art of Fiction

The Practice of Writing

Consciousness and the Novel

The Year of Henry James

Lives in Writing

DRAMA

The Writing Game

Home Truths

Secret Thoughts

MEMOIR

Quite a Good Time to Be Born

FOREWORD

The Foreword to my previous volume of autobiography, Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir 1935–1975, published in 2015, concluded:

The book you hold in your hands, however, covers not the next forty years of my life, but just fifteen of them. There were two reasons for this change of plan. One was the greater availability of data about the middle period of my life, and the second was what I hope is the inherent interest of this material. The narrative of my early life as a child and youth was necessarily based mainly on personal memories, supported by a precious but tantalisingly meagre collection of letters, photographs and other documents. It wasn’t until the 1970s that I began to fill a succession of bulky folders and boxfiles with letters both personal and professional. As time went on and my activities as a writer expanded I also kept occasional diaries and other documents relating to particular projects or journeys. This archive has enabled me to recall all kinds of details about my professional and private life which I could never have summoned up from unaided memory. But trawling through the middle period of my life with a net of finer mesh added weight to the catch and imposed a slower tempo on the narrative than the first memoir, and therefore a shorter time span. The focus is still the same, primarily on my work as a writer, with occasional digressions into personal and family life; but the professional life became increasingly full of incident as I combined an academic career with writing novels and, after retiring early from university teaching, began writing stage plays and screenplays as well.

The seventies and eighties were exciting decades for both literary criticism and the literary novel in Britain. Traditional approaches to teaching and writing about literature in universities were challenged by new ways of reading texts and thinking about language. The Booker Prize and similar competitive awards sponsored by big business made the literary novel an object of interest to the mass media, and more lucrative for successful authors than before. I observed and participated in both these developments, and they are the subject matter of much of this book. For several reasons, of which the digitalisation of information and its transmission is probably the most important, the conditions under which literature is produced, circulated and financed have changed since then, generally for the worse as far as authors are concerned. I hope this detailed account of a writer’s life in those more buoyant times will have some documentary value, and that readers of my novels will be interested to trace the ways in which they were conceived and developed. When I told Tom Rosenthal, who published my novels at Secker & Warburg between 1975 and 1984 and was a good friend thereafter, that I was going to write an autobiography, he said immediately, ‘You’ll need three books.’ I am not sure whether I shall write a sequel to this one, but if I do it will perforce have a different, and more selective, structure.

‘Writer’s luck’ is a phrase usually applied to good fortune, and I certainly consider myself lucky to have published my most popular novels in a period when there was something like a boom in literary fiction in Britain. The phrase can also apply to the discovery of a promising subject – for instance, when Thomas Keneally walked into a leather goods shop in Los Angeles one day to buy a briefcase and got chatting to the proprietor, who proceeded to tell him about Oscar Schindler. Without that chance encounter there would have been no Schindler’s Ark. I haven’t had a gift as astonishing as that, but there are many moments recalled in these pages where chance played a crucial part in inspiring or facilitating some important element in a work of fiction. The words ‘lucky’ or ‘fortunately’ appear quite frequently in this book. So, to a lesser extent, do ‘unlucky’ and ‘unfortunate’, for the possibility of disappointment and frustration for reasons outside one’s control is inherent in all artistic activity. My experience of that is recorded here too.

In the course of a long career I published occasional accounts of my experiences in newspapers, magazines, collections of essays and introductions to reissued novels. I have drawn on these sources where it seemed appropriate and I have not hesitated to use their words, either in quotation or integrated into the narrative, when I could not think of better ones. What is written when the memory of an event is still fresh is likely to give a more accurate and expressive account of it than something composed long afterwards.

D.L., September 2017

1

Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir 1935–19751 ended with a brief glance forward to a book I published some years after the memoir’s terminal date, a novel about

This conclusion was described by one reviewer as ‘a bombshell’ –presumably because there were few hints in the preceding pages of my harbouring fundamental theological doubts. I presented myself there as someone who had had a rather narrow and shallow Catholic education which nevertheless informed and stimulated my early attempts at creative writing. These were also influenced by the work of Catholic authors like Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh whose vision was essentially anti-humanist, privileging the supernatural drama of sin and salvation over the secular pursuit of material progress. My passage into adult life and its challenges, coinciding with a revolution in the Church triggered by the election of Pope John XXIII and the Second Vatican Council which he convened, transformed me into a liberal Catholic, supporting the modernisation of the Church in its organisation, liturgy and teaching, especially on the issue of birth control; but I did not consciously question the fundamental articles of the Creed or ask myself in what sense I actually believed in them until I started thinking about writing a novel that would reflect the extraordinary transformation of Catholicism that had occurred since the early 1960s.

I wrote once: ‘A novel is a long answer to the question, What is it about?’ The fundamental challenge for a novelist is to find the appropriate form for that answer, something which entails not just the invention of a story and its characters but all sorts of decisions about such matters as the point or points of view from which the story is told, the treatment of time, and verbal style. From its inception I decided this novel must have a large number of characters of more or less equal importance, with no central character or characters as in most novels, so that the full spectrum of attitudes and responses to the changing Catholic scene could be displayed. I also decided that the time span of the narrative should run from the early 1950s to the time of writing it in the late 1970s. Both these choices suggested that the dominant voice of the novel should be an intrusive authorial narrator, who would summarise and comment on the action and move it rapidly forward in time and history.

A fundamental distinction in the theory and practice of narrative literature is between ‘telling’ and ‘showing’ what happens in a story. Modern literary fiction generally favours the latter, either by using the technique of free indirect style, which fuses the authorial narrator’s voice with the inner voice of a character’s consciousness, or by having a character narrate the story in the first person. Both methods simultaneously ‘tell’ what happened and ‘show’ how it was subjectively perceived. The omniscient authorial narrator who describes, comments on and interprets the characters and their actions is a convention especially associated with the classic realist fiction of the nineteenth century, and was shunned as old-fashioned by most literary novelists in the first half of the twentieth. But in the 1960s a number of novelists began to get new effects from this narrative method by deliberately drawing attention to its artificiality. It was a feature of writing identified as ‘postmodernist’ – breaking away from the smoothly integrated showing and telling favoured by novelists in the forties and fifties but without reverting to the innovative methods of the great modernist writers earlier in the century like James Joyce and Virginia Woolf: stream-of-consciousness monologues, mythical allusions, overt symbolism and fractured syntax. John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman, Muriel Spark’s The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie and Kurt Vonnegut’s Slaughterhouse-Five were three novels of the sixties I admired and wrote about as a critic, excited by the different ways their authors occasionally or repeatedly broke the illusion of reality they had created by drawing attention to how it was done. It was a technique that I thought would be appropriate to the novel I was preparing to write. In the first chapter ten students attending a weekday morning mass are rapidly introduced, and then recapitulated by an authorial narrator:

Academic critics began to call this kind of novel ‘metafiction’, fiction which is partly about its own processes as well as about imaginary characters and events. Although as an effect it was not entirely new (it goes back as far as Laurence Sterne’s Tristram Shandy in English fiction), to make it the dominant element in a novel is always a risky procedure, apt to irritate and alienate some readers. But I felt that as well as enabling me to handle a great chunk of human experience in a small textual space, it reflected the risks my characters were taking in their personal lives as a result of questioning aspects of the faith in which they had been brought up. The question that gives the novel its title is first quoted as one with which boys at a Catholic school teased the old priest who ‘took’ them for religious instruction, ‘Please Father, how far can you go with a girl, Father?’ Sexual behaviour is certainly a key moral issue for the characters, but the phrase acquires a wider relevance as the story proceeds.

Father Austin Brierley, the diffident and repressed curate who celebrates the mass they attend as students in the first chapter, is radicalised first by being exposed to demythologising biblical scholarship, and later by publicly opposing the papal Encyclical of 1968, Humanae Vitae, which reaffirmed the Church’s teaching against contraception. Suspended by his bishop on this account, he is supported by a movement of progressive laity called Catholics for a Changing Church (based on the actual Catholic Renewal Movement I described in QAGTTBB) to which several of the characters belong. He attends their ‘agapes’, meals hosted by different couples in turn, imitating the chaste love feasts of the early Christians, at which wholemeal bread is broken and passed round with cheap wine in a single cup or bowl in commemoration of the Last Supper, accompanied by New Testament readings and discussion. With Fr Brierly present:

This last image echoes a bleaker passage in Matthew Arnold’s great poem ‘Dover Beach’.

In 1984, several years after I wrote my novel, a television programme and associated book entitled Sea of Faith, by Don Cupitt, the Anglican Dean of Emmanuel College, Cambridge, prompted the formation of a movement or network of sceptical Christians and interested agnostics and atheists which adopted the Arnoldian phrase as its name. Its principles may be summarised as follows: religion is a creation of human consciousness and human culture. God did not create man – it was the other way round. The concept of a transcendent deity denoted by the word ‘God’ in religious discourse is without foundations and no longer commands the assent of thoughtful people in the modern world, where truth is established by scientific method. Nevertheless religion, especially Christianity for those who have been brought up in it, is or can be a cultural and spiritual force for good. Its rituals and ethos deserve to be kept up. There is something Cupitt called ‘the religious requirement’ (and Matthew Arnold more eloquently ‘the eternal not ourselves that makes for righteousness’) which should be obeyed for the sake of civilisation.

Predictably this position attracted criticism and ridicule from orthodox Christians and dogmatic materialists alike, but in me it struck a sympathetic chord, and in later years, when asked about my religious beliefs, I would sometimes describe myself as a ‘Sea of Faith Catholic’, although I never had any personal contact with the movement. The practice of religion, especially Catholic Christianity if that happens to be the tradition in which you were brought up, can be a useful stimulus to thinking seriously about fundamental questions which don’t go away if you simply ignore them, questions formulated by the philosopher Kant which the radical Catholic theologian Hans Küng cited at the beginning of his book On Being a Christian, some of which I used as the epigraph to How Far Can You Go?

The Creed and the Catechism had their answers of course, but like many others I found them increasingly difficult to accept in a literal sense. I decided that the language of religion is essentially metaphorical or symbolic and therefore comparable to literary language, which creates a virtual reality always open to variable interpretation. On this basis I continued to immerse myself once a week in that discourse by attending Sunday mass, saying the responses, reciting the Creed, singing the hymns, listening to the scriptural readings and the homilies, but with increasing awareness of the cognitive dissonance between what was said or what I said in response, and what I actually believed or did not believe. There were personal, familial reasons for persevering. My wife Mary’s faith is deep and strong and not essentially intellectual. I did not wish to disturb it or place a barrier between us by questioning it; and I wanted my children to have a religious upbringing, so that they should know what it offered before they decided for themselves whether to continue with it, and would acquire some knowledge of the Christian elements in our cultural heritage. So it was not until a few years ago that I stopped going to mass regularly and publicly declared, when asked, that I was no longer a ‘practising Catholic’. But how that came about, and worked out, does not come within the time frame of this book.

I started writing How Far Can You Go? in 1977, having spent some time previously making notes on subjects like the lives of nuns, modern biblical scholarship, liberation theology and the surprising emergence of a Catholic charismatic movement. In the same year I published a book of academic criticism, The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature, the writing of which had largely occupied me in the early seventies while Changing Places was making its painfully slow progress towards publication in 1975. The success of that novel did not weaken my commitment to the dual career of creative writer and academic critic, and in fact I published a novel and a book of criticism alternately for many years to come.

Criticism, like literature itself, has a periodic need to renew and refresh its methods, partly in response to new developments in writing, and partly in order to find new meanings in familiar texts. In the late sixties and early seventies something called ‘structuralism’ exerted a growing influence on academic criticism and the humanities generally. It was a way of analysing literature and all forms of cultural production from surrealism to striptease, by identifying the systems of signification they used rather than by responding intuitively to their surface effects. Its lineage was Continental European and went back to the first decades of the twentieth century. One of its father figures was the linguist Roman Jakobson, who came of age in the fertile intellectual and artistic climate of post-Revolutionary Russia and ended his career in the United States. But the news about structuralism came to Britain and America in the 1960s primarily from Paris, where a brilliant generation of critics and theorists, of whom Roland Barthes was the pace-setter, challenged academic orthodoxy under the banner of the nouvelle critique. They had in common with the British and American exponents of the New Criticism a focus on the literary text as a verbal object to be elucidated by analysis rather than by reference to the historical and biographical circumstances of its composition, but the French approach was more theoretical, abstract and deductive.

I am aware that some of my readers will not be much interested in literary and linguistic theory, and indeed their eyes may have already begun to glaze over at the mention of the word ‘structuralism’. If so, they may prefer to skip the next few pages, although this kind of intellectual activity was an essential part of my life for many years and therefore cannot be omitted from a record of that life. It also fed into several of my novels in various ways. One of the most successful readings I have given from my fiction is the scene in Nice Work when the young feminist lecturer Robin Penrose gives a structuralist analysis of a poster advertising Silk Cut cigarettes to the incredulous and scandalised managing director of an engineering company whom she is shadowing. I could never have written it if I had not first written The Modes of Modern Writing.

As the teacher of an undergraduate course at the University of Birmingham called Comparative Critical Approaches and convenor of a weekly seminar for postgraduates on critical theory and methodology, I naturally took an interest in the work loosely bundled together under the label of structuralism, strange and difficult as it often seemed. The cryptic, declarative style of Roland Barthes’ Writing Degree Zero, for instance, one of the first examples of the nouvelle critique translated and published in Britain in 1967, was a shock to someone used to the reader-friendly conversational style of British criticism, while I found the same author’s Elements of Semiology, its title deceptively suggestive of a beginner’s guide, almost incomprehensible. I did however remember from that discouraging experience an intriguing reference to Roman Jakobson’s distinction between metaphor and metonymy which seemed worth following up when my friend and former Birmingham colleague Malcolm Bradbury asked me to contribute an essay on ‘The Language of Modern Fiction’ to a Penguin symposium called Modernism which he was co-editing. My starting point in trying to generalise about the language of novelists who wrote in very different styles was something I had often observed in reading early twentieth-century fiction, namely that the prose of the great modernists such as Henry James, James Joyce and Virginia Woolf was notable for an abundance of metaphor, whereas the representative writers of the 1930s such as Christopher Isherwood, George Orwell and Graham Greene, who were consciously reacting against the older generation, preferred simile to metaphor when using figurative language derived from resemblances between things otherwise different. Barthes’ reference led me to a paper by Jakobson entitled ‘Two Aspects of Language and Two Types of Aphasic Disturbances’, first published in 1956, which revealed a much more fundamental and illuminating distinction: between metaphor and simile on the one hand, opposed to metonymy and synecdoche on the other.

All four words belong to the terminology of classical rhetoric and everybody who has a GCSE in English knows (or ought to know) what the first two mean. The third and fourth are less familiar, though speech and writing are saturated with them. Metonymy substitutes an attribute of a thing, or an adjunct or cause or effect of a thing, for the thing itself, while synecdoche substitutes part for whole, or whole for part. In the proverbial phrase ‘the hand that rocks the cradle’ the word hand is a synecdoche signifying ‘mother’ and cradle is a metonym for ‘baby’. These rhetorical figures can of course be combined with metaphor. In a sentence which I made up for illustrative purposes, ‘A hundred keels ploughed the deep’, the synecdoche keels is a part of a ship signifying the whole vessel, ploughed is a metaphor derived from a perceived similarity between the movement of a ship through the sea and the movement of a plough through the earth, and deep is substituted for sea because depth is one of its attributes. The similarity between keels and ploughs could have been expressed in the form of a simile, such as ‘A hundred keels cut through the sea like plough blades’, but not so elegantly. It might work for one ship, but applied to a hundred of them it summons up a rather grotesque image of a fleet of ploughs at sea. This is an indication that simile is more tightly bound to context than metaphor, which was precisely why the realist writers of the thirties favoured it over metaphor.

What is the point of these substitutions? They call attention to the referents by transforming a literal descriptive word or phrase into something that needs a little more effort to decode. They are ways of ‘defamiliarising’ (a very useful structuralist term) an item in a discourse. ‘A hundred keels ploughed the deep’ is a figurative transformation of the dull referential sentence ‘A hundred ships crossed the sea’. Such metaphors and metonyms can become clichés, and then their effect is weakened because they require no conscious decoding. The creative writer is constantly challenged to find fresh ways of describing the world by using rhetorical figures of speech like metaphor and simile, metonymy and synecdoche.

Traditionally the second, third and fourth of these tropes had been regarded by grammarians as variations on the first because they all substitute a figurative description for a literal one, but Jakobson saw the two pairs as structurally different, metaphor/simile being based on similarity, and metonymy/synecdoche on contiguity (e.g. a keel is not like a ship, it is part of a ship) and he applied this distinction to all discourse, including the fractured speech of people suffering from aphasia, and indeed to all forms of cultural production:

The universal applicability of the theory captivated me. Cubist painting is metonymic (an assemblage of parts) and surrealist painting metaphoric (combining images belonging to quite different contexts). The cinematic close-up is metonymic (or more exactly synecdochic, part representing the whole) while cinematic montage of the kind invented by Eisenstein (e.g. soldiers being gunned down spliced with cattle being slaughtered) is metaphoric. Condensation and displacement in Freudian dream analysis are metonymic, symbolism (usually sexual) metaphoric. The theory is one of dominance, and the beauty of it is that it can be applied differently at different levels of generality. Thus poetry (verse composition) is dominantly metaphoric, emphasising phonological and rhythmical similarities as well as semantic ones, and prose is dominantly metonymic, connecting one topic to another according to their contiguity in space and time or logic; but there is poetic prose (in Virginia Woolf’s work, for example) and prosaic poetry (in Philip Larkin’s) in which the language is used contrary to generic convention for specific effect.

I was particularly struck by Jakobson’s comment on the realistic novel as a genre, because it offered a way of accounting for the effectiveness of this kind of writing in terms of form rather than content, a project I had attempted with limited success in my first critical book, Language of Fiction. He says:

The importance of circumstantial detail, what Henry James called ‘solidity of specification’, in creating the illusion of reality in novels is generally recognised, but in Jakobson’s perspective it can be seen as not merely an observant element in prose fiction, but also an expressive one. His remark about Anna Karenina’s red handbag made me revisit the scene with a fresh eye. A detail like that is a kind of synecdoche representing the multiplicity of items in her dress and appearance which would take pages to describe in full, and by being selected in this way and referred to more than once it gathers quasi-metaphorical associations and connotations without disturbing the realistic rendering of the situation. Anna’s choice of colour is expressive of her character: red is a colour associated with passion and blood and adultery (as in ‘scarlet woman’ and the scarlet letter of Hawthorne’s tale). But a handbag is also a woman’s most important accessory, one essential to the conduct of her everyday life, and when the weight of the bag on her arm hinders Anna from throwing herself under the first truck of the train, slowly passing her as she stands on the platform, it is as if life gives her a last opportunity to refuse death. She is reminded of her hesitation at the moment of plunging into the sea to bathe, and ‘for an instant life passed before her with all its past joys. But she did not take her eyes off the approaching second truck.’

What had started as an article on style in modern fiction rapidly grew into a book of ambitious scope which, though predominantly focused on the novel, also dealt with poetry and drama, and other cultural phenomena, applying Jakobson’s theory in close analysis and comparison of a wide range of texts. To give some continuity to the argument I returned repeatedly to several different descriptions of the same subject – execution: the report of a hanging witnessed by a Guardian journalist, Michael Lake; George Orwell’s putatively autobiographical essay ‘A Hanging’; Arnold Bennett’s use in The Old Wives’ Tale of a public execution by guillotine as the setting for a crisis in his heroine’s life; Oscar Wilde’s poem The Ballad of Reading Gaol; and the surrealistic hanging scene in William Burroughs’s The Naked Lunch. Surveyed in that order they illustrate the continuum that extends from the metonymic to the metaphoric poles of writing.

I finished the book late in 1975, and sent it off to my agents, Curtis Brown, where Andrew Best was now exclusively handling academic and educational books, for onward transmission to Routledge & Kegan Paul who had published my two previous works of literary criticism, and Cornell University Press who had published the second of them. I was confident that Routledge would accept The Modes of Modern Writing, and even more so when Andrew informed me in February of the New Year that Cornell had received very favourable reports on the MS and were ready to publish it in collaboration with Routledge. But at the beginning of March I had a letter from him with ‘the somewhat astonishing news’ that Routledge had rejected the book, and that he had sent it to Edward Arnold, who had promptly accepted it. I was annoyed that he had acted without consulting me, but Arnold was a respected academic publisher and made a reasonable offer, which I accepted. Cornell teamed up with them. Nevertheless Routledge’s rejection continued to rankle until I discovered that it was the result of an internal blunder which they tried, too late, to undo.

At about that time Jim Boulton, Head of the Birmingham English Department, put my name forward for a personal chair, i.e. a professorship not connected to an established post. The proposal was approved, and I gave my inaugural lecture as Professor of Modern English Literature in December 1976. Entitled ‘Modernism, Antimodernism and Postmodernism’, it was a highly condensed version of Modes. The industrial strife that would give rise to the following year’s ‘winter of discontent’ was already extensive enough to cause power cuts, and I remember that the lecture theatre was freezing and many in the audience kept their overcoats on, but their reception was warm.

The Modes of Modern Writing was published in the autumn of 1977 and received numerous reviews in academic journals on both sides of the Atlantic, most of them favourable. Its reception in the British quality press, where such books were still occasionally reviewed, was more mixed. Up till that point the methods of teaching and writing about English literature in British universities had been divided between historical scholarship and the evaluative interpretation of texts by ‘close reading’, and sometimes there were clashes between these two schools of thought. But now the battle lines were being redrawn by the impact of structuralism. Some close readers like myself welcomed the explanatory power of its ideas, but others recoiled in dismay, and displayed something like panic at its increasing influence. Some of the reviewers who admired my commentaries on particular texts claimed that I didn’t really need this theoretical apparatus and probably didn’t really believe in it. A young don at Oxford, Peter Conrad, went further and wrote an extraordinary tirade in the New Statesman accusing me of perpetrating ‘vengeful decreation’ on literature: ‘The nasty thrill with which Mr Lodge announces that he has reduced novels to figments of language “defamiliarising” (his word) the world we know and exterminating character, alerts us to the aggressive dislike of literature criticism of this kind often betrays … English empiricism, it seems from this book, has lost its nerve and … capitulated to the deconstructing, obfuscating hierarchs of what Mr Lodge calls the “nouvelle critique” … Things have come to a pretty pass.’ I wrote a letter to the New Statesman identifying five of his assertions about my book which were precisely opposite to the truth, and concluded: ‘Things have come to a pretty pass indeed, when something like this passes for a review.’ Peter Conrad did not reply.

‘Defamiliarising’ was of course not my word, but a term used by Viktor Shklovsky, one of the Russian Formalist critics who flourished in the 1920s, and was attributed to him in my book. It’s a translation of the Russian ostranenie, literally ‘making strange’. Shklovsky wrote:

This seems to me the best answer ever given to the question ‘What is the use of art?’, at least as far as the verbal and visual arts are concerned (music offers a different challenge to aesthetics). It was implicitly a defence of the radical innovations of modernism, but it applies to the great art, and the good art, of all periods.

In the course of time, as structuralism turned into poststructuralism, and then became a hugely inflated field of multidisciplinary academic discourse about culture and society referred to simply as ‘Theory’, I myself became troubled by the obfuscatory jargon it employed – often, it seemed, designed to mystify rather than enlighten the reader, and thus demonstrate the writer’s privileged access to the truth. But criticism cannot do entirely without jargon. To analyse language in use, you need a metalanguage, and it seemed to me in the 1970s that the metalanguage employed by Jakobson and later critics in the structuralist tradition like Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette and Roland Barthes justified itself by its usefulness in answering the questions posed by Gertrude Stein which I used as the epigraph for The Modes of Modern Writing: ‘What does literature do and how does it do it. And what does English literature do and how does it do it. And what ways does it use to do what it does.’ Modes did not pretend to be a book for ‘the general reader’, but it had a long life as such publications go, remaining in print for more than thirty years, and was reissued by Bloomsbury Academic in 2015.

I spent the summer term of that year, 1977, as Henfield Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, taking unpaid leave of absence from Birmingham. Malcolm Bradbury had suggested I apply for this one-term appointment and no doubt exerted his influence in my favour. The Fellowship was associated with the MA programme in Creative Writing which he and Angus Wilson (who then had a part-time post at UEA) had founded in 1970, and Malcolm was now its sole Director.

When he and I were students in the 1950s, and for most of the 1960s when we were lecturers, there was no degree course in Creative Writing at any British university. Now there are very few universities which do not offer the subject at undergraduate and/or postgraduate level, and very few younger published writers who do not have such a qualification in their CV. The growth of Creative Writing as an academic subject, and its acceptance as a normal way of preparing to become a professional novelist, poet or playwright, is one of the most striking developments in contemporary culture, the effects of which are still difficult to assess. For centuries writers had learned their craft individually, by reading or listening to the work of others, by imitation, adaptation and experiment. Suddenly it seemed natural to do your apprentice work as a member of a group of students under the tuition of a master in whatever form interested you. Why did that happen?

The expansion of higher education, first in the USA and later in the UK, had something to do with it. In America, where a larger proportion of the 18-plus age group went to college than in Britain, and writers, in an always insecure profession, found teaching on a temporary or permanent basis a congenial ‘day job’, Creative Writing was established as an academic subject much earlier. It is hard to think of any significant American writer of the post-war period who was not at some point a student or teacher of Creative Writing (and often both). The same development occurred much later in Britain because there was a more deep-seated academic resistance to the concept here (as there still is in most Continental European countries) on the grounds that successful literary creation depends on innate personal faculties that cannot be taught and cannot be objectively assessed. They certainly could not be assessed within the structure of the traditional British BA degree by a set of three-hour examinations, and it was only when our universities began to move towards a modular course system that it became feasible to incorporate Creative Writing into the curriculum. An element of intellectual rigour was introduced into the subject by requiring students to give an analytical account of the genesis and composition of their work when submitting it. Creative Writing now justifies its place in the humanities as a discipline which trains the mind like any other subject and does not necessarily have a vocational application. Without being entirely convinced by that claim, I believe that creative writing exercises should have a place in every undergraduate degree course in English, because they enhance students’ critical understanding of the process of literary composition. But a majority of the students who choose Creative Writing as a postgraduate degree or as the major part of an undergraduate degree have literary aspirations of their own.

The UEA course under Malcolm’s direction gave a crucially important impetus to the phenomenon in Britain, and if it was not quite the first of its kind it was soon the most successful and influential. It thrived because from an early stage in its history it produced graduates who went on to make their mark as published writers. In the first year’s intake there was only one student – but he was Ian McEwan. Kazuo Ishiguro and Rose Tremain soon followed in his footsteps, and a steady stream of other young writers who got their work published soon after graduating. New programmes in Creative Writing sprang up all over the country, but UEA has remained the most coveted place to pursue it, under the direction of other authors following Malcolm’s retirement. Its website currently lists several hundred alumni whose work has been published, including many names well known to readers of contemporary fiction.

The duties of the Henfield Fellowship were light: to run a writing workshop one evening a week open to candidates from the local community as well as the University, to invite the occasional visiting speaker, and to be available for a few hours each week to talk to individual students. Otherwise the Fellows were free to get on with their own work. There was a modest stipend and free accommodation was provided in a small flat on the campus. It seemed an ideal opportunity to get on with the novel about Catholics I had just started, free from teaching, exam marking and domestic responsibilities. To make the most of it I agreed with Mary that I would spend the whole term on the UEA campus, rather than commuting back and forth, and she generously accepted the extra burden this would entail for her. Indeed she claims she positively encouraged me to do so, knowing what a preoccupied, irritable and unrewarding partner I was when getting a new novel under way. Since our six months in Berkeley in 1969 I had received frequent invitations to be a visiting professor at various American universities which I had to turn down, sometimes regretfully, because we didn’t wish to disturb the children’s education, so I looked forward to a change of academic environment while still remaining within easy reach of home if needed. And it certainly was a change.

UEA was one of the first of the ‘new universities’ that were built in the sixties and seventies in response to the report of the government-appointed Robbins Committee which called for a massive expansion of higher education in Britain, and it was one of the most successful in attracting talented staff and bright students. These institutions were usually located in pleasant pastoral sites on the outskirts of historic towns and cities, built from scratch on the American campus model, with ample residential accommodation for students. The striking architecture of UEA was the work of the Corbusier-influenced Denys Lasdun, who put all the teaching and research accommodation into a single curving concrete unit half a mile long, with elevated walkways giving access to the various departments and service roads underneath, while the accommodation blocks were terraced ziggurats, like blunt pyramids. It looked rather like a futuristic city from a science fiction illustration plonked down on the flat fields at the edge of Norwich. The architecture wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but it certainly made a statement: this is going to be a new kind of university.

A considerable number of them were built in various regions of the country. It was an expensive way of boosting the number of university graduates in a system almost entirely funded by the state, for universities are costly institutions to build and equip with adequate libraries and laboratories and study-bedrooms. Arguably it would have been more economical to build fewer of them, investing more in expanding existing urban universities, and encouraging students to attend their local ones, as they commonly did on the Continent. But the Oxbridge model of residential university education, which runs so deep in the psyche of the British establishment, prevailed. The University of Kent at Canterbury even had several ‘colleges’ on its site, between which staff and students were distributed. The new universities were however very popular. Academic staff welcomed the opportunities to initiate new subject areas, courses and research projects, and bright student applicants were also attracted by these features.

To me, a mature man temporarily separated from his family and a university embedded in a big industrial city, the UEA students seemed to inhabit an enclosed world. The campus contained almost everything they needed – shops, a bank, a post office, a medical centre, a counselling service, places to eat and drink – and many who lived on campus never left it from the beginning of term to the end. Every evening some form of entertainment was available. Feature films were shown for a negligible admission charge in the lecture theatres in the evenings (and I took advantage of them). At the weekends there were rock concerts and dances in venues from which the thud of bass notes and the wail of guitar riffs emanated and vibrated on the night air, though the young people in their flared trousers, cheesecloth shirts and maxi dresses called them not ‘dances’ but ‘bops’, knowing nothing of the bebop of the fifties – jazz that was listened to, not danced to – from which this term must have somehow been derived. Youth culture ruled the campus, and at its centre, in the student union building, there was a room full of pinball machines which was never unoccupied in my observation.

If the Bradburys had not been at hand I might have been very lonely. Malcolm was on study leave that term, but working from home. I was given his office to use for my weekly ‘office hours’, with his nameplate still on the door, no doubt encouraging the growing tendency of the world to confuse us and the authorship of our books. He and Elizabeth occupied a handsome Queen Anne dower house in a quiet cul-de-sac close to the centre of Norwich. I spent most Sundays with them and their two boys, Matthew and Dominic. They had bought a modern cottage near the coast with a bigger garden than the Norwich house and we practised (rather than played) a decorous form of cricket on the lawn there after lunch, or went for a walk on a nearby beach. Mary and I had often stayed with the family, and as a result we acquired a circle of acquaintance in Norwich and beyond, including Chris Bigsby and his wife Pam, and Anthony and Ann Thwaite, all of whom remained lifetime friends. Chris was Malcolm’s colleague in American Studies and became the leading authority on Arthur Miller, and his official biographer. In their early years at UEA he collaborated with Malcolm on various writing projects including comedy scripts for radio and a TV play, The After Dinner Game