They are sexually innocent to a degree that they will scarcely be able to credit when looking back on their youth in years to come. They know about the mechanics of basic copulation, but none of them could give an accurate account of the processes of fertilization, gestation and birth, and three of the young men do not even know how babies are born, vaguely supposing that they appear by some natural form of Caesarean section, like ripe chestnuts splitting their husks.
SO SAYS THE authorial narrator of How Far Can You Go? about a group of Catholic students aged eighteen to nineteen, gathered together at mass on St Valentine’s Day in February 1952. No reader of my own generation has ever questioned the plausibility of this description of their ignorance, so I presume that it would have applied to a much larger sample of this age group in real life at that date. I knew a little more than the three fictional young men when I got married, but I followed a steep learning curve after Mary became pregnant. I did not accompany her to the antenatal classes – husbands were not invited – but I took a keen interest in the Childbirth Without Pain exercises she did at home and learned how to help her when she went into labour. Our commitment to this innovative procedure was ideological as well as practical, and for Mary it was a precursor of the Women’s Liberation movement which began a decade later, but it was viewed with scepticism and suspicion by those members of the British medical profession who had heard of it at all. There was no possibility of my being allowed to be present at the birth, but after some negotiation with the staff at St Thomas’s, the large teaching hospital where Mary was booked in, they grudgingly agreed that I could be with her in the early stages of labour and briefly when she was taken into the delivery room. As it was a first baby, we were expecting a fairly long labour and that we would practise the breathing at home for a while before it was time for me to call the ambulance from the telephone box at the corner of the street (we had no phone and neither did our landlady). What actually happened I described in a letter to Park and Jeannette, written two days later, in which I borrowed something of the demonstrative buoyancy of Park’s own epistolary style for the occasion. (It is one of the very few private letters of mine that have survived from that period, because Park kept it.)
The big news is I’M A FATHER of – (pace Poopie and Tasha) – the most beautiful daughter in the world, name of Julia Mary! You will be delighted to know that the Lamaze/Vellay method worked like a charm. You were the first to put us on to it, and we can’t thank you enough. The story is briefly as follows: at about 3 a.m. on February 16th Mary’s waters broke, and contractions started coming pretty intensely at about one a minute. I said it would be a quick birth, and was I right! Mary got working on the shallow breathing while I got things together and phoned the ambulance. We didn’t rush and were admitted to St Thomas’s Hospital just after four. After a great deal of persuasion I had got the authorities to agree to my staying with Mary for the first part of the labour, and arrived with books, prepared for several hours of waiting afterwards. To our astonishment and joy she was found to be fully dilated and taken straight into the delivery room. I was allowed to see her for a few minutes there as she began to push out the baby. She looked marvellous. Julia was born at 6 a.m., and I saw Mary soon afterwards. She was cuddling the baby and looked still more marvellous. I saw the baby weighed (6 pounds 14 ounces) and went home in a cheerful daze, restraining myself with difficulty from telling bus conductors and passers-by the news.
The whole thing took only three hours from start to finish, and was accomplished without pain or anaesthetics. Unfortunately the cack-handed student who delivered the baby managed to tear Mary a little with the baby’s shoulder (he said ‘Sorry’!) and she had to have a few stitches. The whole thing was a wonderful experience for both of us, and next time nobody’s going to keep me out of the delivery room. I don’t think I have ever admired Mary so much . . . She has shaken the hospital’s scepticism about C.W.P. and students are trooping in [to the ward] all day to ask her questions about it.
Like most young couples with a first baby, we were not really prepared for the consequent disruption to the rhythm of our lives, especially of sleep. Getting up in the middle of the midwinter night to feed Julia in a house without central heating was a challenge. At first I felt obliged to keep Mary company as she suckled the child, gazing enviously the while at the voluptuously enhanced breasts her tiny fingers kneaded; later I tended to feign sleep, but when Mary supplemented her breast milk with a bottle I learned to take my turn with that. The flat was not ideal for bringing up a baby. The small kitchen sink, concealed in a cupboard, was the only place to wash things, and a clothes line on a pulley outside the kitchen window the only place to dry them, so we extravagantly subscribed to a dedicated laundry service that collected and delivered every few days, keeping the soiled nappies in a vessel filled with a sterilising liquid called Milton. The incongruous association with the great poet fixed the name in my memory for ever. In due course we acquired the pram in the hall that Cyril Connolly famously called ‘the enemy of art’, an aphorism I intended to refute, and wheeled it into Battersea Park to give Julia a modicum of the fresh air that folk wisdom prescribed for her health. (American friends used to say that you could always tell British infants by their raw red cheeks and runny noses, caused by prolonged exposure to the elements.) We were indebted to our landlady for her tolerance of the pram and its occupant, but in truth she and her aged mother were enraptured with the baby and it gave a new dimension of interest to their lives. They may have been worried that we might conceive another before long, because the mother, a very old lady who never left the house, took the opportunity when Mary brought Julia to see her one day to offer some advice on birth control. ‘You just pull away, dear,’ she said, lowering her voice discreetly. ‘Pull away at the right moment.’ Before we resumed sexual relations we paid another visit to the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council, and were instructed in a new and more reliable way of identifying the safe period of a woman’s monthly cycle by recording the rise and fall of her bodily temperature, most efficiently by employing a rectal thermometer. The inconveniences of this method were comically portrayed some years later in my novel The British Museum is Falling Down; but it did work – for about a year.
Winter gave way to spring, and spring to summer, and I still had no university job in prospect. In that academic year I applied for assistant lectureships at Keele and Hull without being shortlisted for either of them, and was called for interview only once, at Birmingham. It was for a fellowship in the Arts Faculty, tenable for three years, which offered young scholars an opportunity to pursue their own research while doing a limited amount of teaching in the appropriate department. I was hopeful about this opening because the Head of English at Birmingham was T.J.B. Spencer, who had been at UCL when I was an undergraduate, and might remember giving me a straight A for my term paper on the History of Lit Crit. He had also been Mary’s tutor in her third year, but it was unlikely that he knew we had married. The Arts Faculty of Birmingham University was due to move to the Edgbaston campus in a year’s time, and was still housed in the centre of the city, in a building that had a worn, neglected aspect and smelled faintly of drains and gas inside. The selection committee consisted only of Spencer and the Dean of the Faculty, and the interview was relaxed – too relaxed to bode well, I thought, and I was not surprised when the fellowship was offered to someone else. Afterwards, as I was leaving the building, Spencer said a few private words of commiseration which showed that he remembered me from UCL, and I took the opportunity to mention that my wife was his former tutee, Mary Jacob.
In May a lectureship in the English Department at Birmingham was advertised, and my hopes were ignited again. But I heard nothing after the acknowledgement of my application, and resigned myself to another rejection – in some ways the most disappointing of all. I knew that I could probably stay on at the Overseas Students Centre for another year, but it was a job with no future unless I signed up for a career with the British Council, and I didn’t want that. I was seriously thinking of applying to teach in technical colleges, though Park urged me not to, ‘until all other possibilities are exhausted’. As usual, his hyperbolic rhetoric cheered me up. ‘I simply can’t believe that a university with sanity and judgment wouldn’t jump to get you now,’ he wrote. ‘They must be flooded by relatives, bribes, incest and non-compos-mentis Departmental Chairmen pressured by moneyed alumni.’ I took every opportunity to remind senior academic contacts of my existence by sending them offprints of articles that I had carved out of my thesis. One day I heard a talk on BBC Radio by George Kane, who had been Mary’s tutor in her second year, and had taken an interest in our post-graduation lives as a couple, once inviting us to tea at home with his wife. He was now occupying a chair at Royal Holloway College, and hearing his talk prompted me to send him the offprint of an article on Edmund Randolph, one of the few Victorian Catholic novelists who deserved to be rescued from obscurity, which I had just published in the Aylesford Review, a small literary magazine edited by the maverick Carmelite monk Brocard Sewell. Kane thanked me for the offprint, which he claimed had made him want to read Randolph’s novel Mostly Fools, and continued: ‘I am glad that the British Council work is going well, but grieved because you have not yet got the university job which you want. You should be being called to interview. What do you think is going on? Is JRS [James Sutherland] perhaps not writing you a strong enough letter? I shall try to remember to get at him for not having placed you yet.’ He went on to give me some excellent advice, which, in a nutshell, was that I should not waste any more time on minor Catholic writers, but get myself a ‘mainline project’ for a PhD or book, to show that I could be trusted to teach the canonical authors of English literature.
In fact I had already come to this conclusion myself. At that time even Graham Greene and Evelyn Waugh, the stars of my thesis, were not regarded as major writers by either the academic establishment or its opponents – the critical school of F.R. Leavis and his followers. While doing my MA I had become increasingly conscious that what distinguished novelists of genuine originality and literary merit (whether ‘major’ or ‘minor’) from the legions of instantly forgettable ones was their feeling for the expressive possibilities of language, and I was vaguely meditating a book on the language of fiction that would deal with classic authors and have a theoretical dimension. Kane’s advice encouraged me to pursue the idea. (Curiously, when I mentioned this to Park in a letter, he said he was pondering a similar project, a book about style in a group of twentieth-century novelists including Hemingway and Waugh.) But what most interested me in Kane’s letter was the glimpse it afforded into the hidden network of patronage and personal contacts which controlled the academic job market. Sutherland had already passed me over for the post of his research assistant. Could it be true that he was not strongly supporting my applications elsewhere, perhaps because he was referee for other candidates for the same jobs?
Through an extraordinary coincidence fifteen years later I came across some fascinating if ambiguous evidence to support this speculation. In 1975 I was asked by the magazine New Society to review a book called Scaling the Ivory Tower: merit and its limits in academic careers by Lionel S. Lewis, an American professor of sociology, published by Johns Hopkins University Press. Lewis’s basic argument was that appointments and promotions are generally determined not by objective assessments of merit but what he called ‘ascribed merit’ and ‘sponsored mobility’ – namely that bright young students who impress their teachers for a number of different reasons, not exclusively academic, are chosen and groomed for the same profession, and started on their career paths by recommendations to senior colleagues in other institutions who got there by the same means, and who share the same values and prejudices. Confidential references for applicants for academic jobs play a crucial part in this process, and one of the most interesting chapters in Lewis’s book was one in which he analysed and interpreted selected passages from large samples of such references, with names deleted, obtained apparently with ease from various universities in America, and in one case, with difficulty, from Britain. (Lewis expressed some amusement at the ‘solicitude and secrecy’ surrounding such documents on this side of the Atlantic.) I was particularly interested in his discussion of the British collection of fifty-seven letters written on behalf of thirty-three candidates for a post in an unnamed department of English, and even more interested when I realised that I was one of them. Two passages revealed this to me. The first was:
Compare the remarks made about a female scholar who completed a study of a female literary figure with those made about a male who, even if lacking innate intuition, is still obviously qualified: ‘a sympathetic and judicious understanding of her subject, both as a woman and as a writer’; and ‘The subject of his thesis was Catholic Fiction . . . and though I did not examine it I understand it was a very good piece of work. ([He], by the way, is a Catholic.)’ The issue, then, is not one of sex (or religion) per se, but of trusting an insider to find and recognize the truth.
The truth, in this case, evidently being that the woman was the stronger candidate, though why Lewis inferred that I lacked ‘innate intuition’ was not clear. Any doubt as to the identity of the male candidate was dispelled by the second passage: ‘His post at the British Council is not the usual job, lunching with visiting oriental professors and introducing them to various people, but is mainly concerned with teaching.’ Lewis cited this as an example of the adversative ‘but’ to conceal or minimise a ‘deficiency’ in the candidate. I am fairly sure the passages quoted were written by Sutherland rather than another of my referees (the reference to not examining my thesis is a clue) and it has to be said that they lack enthusiasm. I had some fun with my discovery in reviewing the book, and some weeks later received a courteous but guarded letter from Professor Lewis conceding that I could have been the subject of the reference quoted (from which all names had been removed) and explaining that ‘innate intuition’ was intended as a humorous allusion to the idea of ‘female intuition’. He apologised for making me feel ‘unecessarily uncomfortable’. At that point in time I was sufficiently secure in my academic career to feel nothing but amusement at a coincidence that would have been condemned as incredible in a campus novel.
In June 1960 my spirits were lifted by the arrival of six author’s copies of The Picturegoers, the publication of which had been postponed from spring to July. Nothing in a novelist’s life quite equals the thrill of handling and opening the first mint copy of one’s first novel. It had an attractive cover, a steep bank of red cinema seats occupied in places by well-observed portraits of some of the characters. I had not seen it before; if I had, I would have corrected a mistake in the blurb (‘noviciate’ for ‘novice’). It would be some time before I learned to insist on checking everything connected with a new book before it went to press – or had the confidence to do so. Like most hardback novels of that period it was a compact duodecimo, clearly printed on pages that were gathered and bound so that the book opened comfortably in the hands. There was no organised publicity for it – I don’t think MacGibbon & Kee possessed a publicity department as such, or if they did I was not aware of it, either then or later. Publishing literary fiction was a simple business in those days: your book was sent out into the world without your participation, and you sat back and waited for the reviews. But at least you could feel confident of getting some reviews, which cannot be said of most first novels today. Far fewer titles were published in 1960, and they were usually reviewed in batches of half a dozen, which gave most authors a good chance of being noticed.
In none of my applications for university jobs did I mention that I had written a novel accepted by a reputable publisher, even when its publication was assured. Nowadays that would be a feather in the cap of any candidate for a post in a university English department, but I thought that including it in my CV might be counter-productive, suggesting that I was not a serious, dedicated scholar. In hindsight I’m sure it would have helped rather than hindered my chances of getting a job; but the decision foreshadowed the way I subsequently conducted my twin careers of novelist and academic for many years, giving equal effort to both, but keeping them in separate compartments of my life as far as possible.
The novel was priced at fifteen shillings, equivalent to about £15 today, but £34 in purchasing power. This caused me great anxiety because there were more than five people to whom, for various reasons, I would have liked to give inscribed copies; but now that Mary was no longer earning, and we had the expenses of a baby, our income was stretched to its limit and I could not afford to buy extra copies, even at author’s discount, to include them all, without breaking into our modest savings. Mum and Dad, of course, had to have one, because the novel was dedicated to them, partly in acknowledgement of their love and support, but also to signal to the reader that the rather unlikeable parents of the principal male character were not based on them. Aunt Eileen, Uncle John and Tante Lu, the Jacob family and Park accounted for four more copies, leaving one for myself. A consequence of this distribution was that I wrote a letter to Malachy Carroll telling him that I had a novel coming out shortly, that I hoped he would read it, and that I would be very interested to know what he thought of it, since I owed so much to his advice and encouragement in the past. I had not had much contact with him for a year or so, and it was even longer since we had met face to face, so it did not surprise me that he did not reply immediately. I assumed he was waiting to read the book. But whether he read it, and what he thought of it if he did, I never discovered, for he did not answer my letter, and eventually I had to draw the conclusion that he was offended because I had not presented him with a copy. At first I shrugged off the rebuff, but the episode caused me increasing agenbite of inwit, the Middle English phrase meaning ‘remorse of conscience’ that Stephen Dedalus applies to his guilt about refusing to kneel and pray with his dying mother, especially after I heard that Malachy had died suddenly in middle life from a heart attack. It seems blindingly obvious now that I should have bought and sent him an inscribed copy, even though he could easily afford to buy it and at the time I could not. I acted from a principle of parsimony which had been bred in me from childhood and, if such a trait can be genetically transmitted, was probably inherited from my father. It took me a long time, and the attainment of a degree of affluence, to overcome it.
The qualms I may have felt on this score in the summer of 1960 were quickly forgotten in a flurry of good news for myself and my friends in July. Park wrote at the beginning of the month to say that his PhD thesis had been accepted by Yale University Press ‘lock, stock and barrel, and they hope to get it out by spring 1961’. It was the first American publisher he had tried, and a very prestigious one. He could hardly believe in his own success, and he was perhaps cautioning himself against hubris when in the same letter he advised me to prepare myself for hostile reviews of The Picturegoers: ‘you must expect the worst of the worst . . . and then – lo! some of them, a couple of them, may just be struck with good sense and a minimum of discernment’. But the reviews were more positive, and in more prominent places, than I had dared to hope. ‘An excellent first novel . . . suggests unlimited promise,’ said the anonymous Times. Kingsley Amis described it as ‘sharp and real – an individual first novel’ in The Observer, and was surprisingly tolerant of its religious content, complaining only of the occasional ‘pea-Greene simile’. Elizabeth Jennings, one of the poets in the influential ‘Movement’ anthology New Lines, and herself a Catholic, described the novel as ‘an arresting achievement for a twenty-five year old author’ in The Listener. This generous reception did not make me instantly famous – far from it. The reviews were not unanimously favourable, and the only other interest the book attracted in the media was connected with a well-known supporting actor in British films called David Lodge, who revealed that he was getting a lot of mail from friends and fans congratulating him on writing a novel about a cinema. The producers of the film in which he was currently performing invited me to meet its star, Norman Wisdom, and my namesake on the set at Pinewood, and a photograph was taken of me standing between them, which appeared in an evening newspaper without occasioning a rush on the bookshops. Although the The Picturegoers sold reasonably well for a first novel (probably something over 2,000 copies), it was not reprinted by MacGibbon & Kee. I was well satisfied, however, and still more in retrospect, because great acclaim for a first novel is an ambivalent gift of fortune. The Picturegoers was published in the same week as Stan Barstow’s first novel, A Kind of Loving, and sometimes reviewed alongside it. A Kind of Loving was a real hit and, helped by a very popular film adaptation, set Barstow up for a long career as a writer, but he never enjoyed the same degree of success with a book afterwards, and that experience, of which there are many other examples, must have been demoralising.
In mid-July, just before these reviews appeared, I received a benign bombshell of a letter from Terence Spencer, which he said (apologising for a cramped page) he had typed himself on University of Birmingham notepaper. In summary it stated that the job for which I had applied was going to ‘a rather senior person’ who could not take it up immediately, and consequently he could offer me a temporary post for one year as an assistant lecturer at the usual starting salary of £800. He was sorry it could only be for one year, but ‘possibly you might find it better to apply for a university post from a university post . . . for you would then seem to have experience and qualifications to improve your chances’. This was of course absolutely true, and I didn’t hesitate to accept the offer, with Mary’s complete agreement. It so happened that Derek Todd, who had also been glumly contemplating a career in the technical college sector, was appointed to a job at Queen’s University Belfast at the same time. When I wrote to Park, who knew Derek, to tell him of our good fortune he replied: ‘Well, if this sort of thing keeps up, none of us will have anything more to complain about & then where will we be? What marvellous news!’
In mid-August I received a letter from the Secretary of Birmingham University confirming my appointment as temporary assistant lecturer for one year, beginning on the 1st of October. There were no other formalities. I resigned from the British Council with effect from 23rd September, and I had twelve days’ leave owing to me which we used to take an economical holiday. A relative of Dad’s owned a small clapboard chalet at the edge of a pebbly beach on the south side of the Thames Estuary, east of Gravesend, and they were willing to rent it to us cheaply for a week or so. I invited Mum to join us, and Dad, though tied up as usual with work, promised to come down for a couple of days. It was a rather desolate spot and the chalet was minimally equipped and furnished; Julia was fractious, probably because she was teething, and Mum’s attempts to advise Mary caused some friction. It was not an idyllic holiday, but nothing could dampen a deep internal glow of satisfaction in getting my first academic job and successfully publishing my first novel.
Shortly after the start of this holiday I received a letter from Dad about The Picturegoers. Although he was due to join us soon for a couple of days, he obviously found it easier to put his thoughts into written form than to speak to me about the novel, for reasons I could understand. There is nearly always a certain reserve between a creative writer and his or her close family members when the latter read the work of the former, especially if they are not familiar with the literary genre to which that work belongs. What it reveals, or seems to reveal, of the writer’s inner life, and perhaps of their outer life too, may be surprising and even shocking. My father, who had read no modern literary fiction later than Evelyn Waugh’s stylised comedies of upper-class decadence, was shocked by my realistic take on contemporary life in south-east London, innocuous as it would seem to any reader of literary fiction today.
Dear Dave, I have just finished your book. I will not pretend that it is my type of reading but I have nothing but admiration for the entire production, particularly for your courage in setting out to write as you have which I consider taking something of a chance in your first novel which after all is the foundation stone of any future a writer may have in published work. The idea of the book is very good and in my humble opinion, the writing – top class. The way you write cannot fail to impress whatever the subject.
The book I would class as a ‘shocker’. That is, it is going to shock a lot of people who are going to tell a lot of other people how shocking it is who will then chase around so that they can themselves be shocked, and that is what you want, or most certainly what the publishers want. The competition amongst the young female assistants round at the Library to get hold of it will undoubtedly set a record. I only hope that our friend the chief Librarian (who has ordered three copies) is not of the Methodist or Salvationist persuasion or I fear it may not get as far as the assistants. I note the few anecdotes from your own life from time to time (or rather experience). The ‘open-mindedness’ with which you have obviously looked upon life up to now is most noticeable and praiseworthy and it will be universally agreed by one and all that ‘there are no flies on this author’. That’s all for now, I feel as if I have written a book myself. Love to Mary and Baby, hope to see you, Dad.
I can’t remember whether he did join us in the chalet, but if so, I’m sure that we wouldn’t have discussed the subject of his letter. That was the pattern of our relationship as far as my writing career was concerned: he followed it with keen interest, especially its practical and financial aspects, and took pride in my successes, but we never discussed my novels in any detail, and I’m far from sure that he read some of the later ones. As for my mother, I don’t think we ever exchanged a word about the content of my books, nor did she write to me about them, though I’m sure that she read them, and took pleasure in my growing reputation. I sent them copies of the more favourable reviews I received, and other press cuttings I thought would interest them, and it was on that level that, by mutual tacit agreement, we communicated about my writing.
When he wrote that letter about The Picturegoers Dad was no longer leading his own trio at the Studio Club, but had returned to ‘gig’ work of various kinds. Times were getting harder for traditional dance musicians like himself, with the first stirrings of a new kind of popular music in the form of skiffle and rock and roll. But the violin had come back into favour as an instrument in certain contexts, so Dad took his fiddle out of its dusty case, practised his fingering, and began to get work as someone who could perform a melodic solo as background music for a banquet, and do reels for hunt balls, as well as playing the saxophone and clarinet for ballroom dancing. The story of his life was one of constant versatility in adjusting to changing circumstances, and I admired him for it, in the original Latin sense that means ‘wonder at’. In the course of the sixties the development of pop and rock music dominated by amplified guitars, the rise of the discotheque and the waning of ballroom dancing signalled the end of Dad’s profession, and he diversified into acting – i.e. performing as a non-speaking ‘extra’ in films and the rapidly expanding field of television drama. He got himself an Equity card and an agent, made fleeting appearances in many popular sitcoms like Porridge and Dad’s Army, and could be glimpsed getting out of a lift behind Peter Sellers and Goldie Hawn in the feature film There’s a Girl in My Soup. He enjoyed this work and took a pride in being picked out by a director for a role that required a bit of character-defining ‘business’. In the early seventies he would sometimes meet and chat with Danny Moynihan in the studios or on location, because Danny then had a steady job as the prosecutor in a long-running drama series on ITV called Crime of Passion, based on French court cases. By the time I began writing television scripts that got produced, beginning with my adaptation of Nice Work in 1989, Dad had retired from acting, but his experience enabled him to engage with and comment on my work in this medium more readily than he could with my novels, partly because he had a professional understanding of what was involved, but partly also because drama is a less intimate, more impersonal form than the novel.
While I was at the chalet I set up a rickety table and chair on its wooden porch and worked for a few hours a day on the first draft of Ginger, You’re Barmy, writing with a fountain pen on a foolscap pad, as was my practice then and for some time after: I would write the whole book to the end in longhand with many cancelled and corrected passages, and then type it up, using that process as an opportunity for further revision. I had made a start on Ginger in the spring, aware of the proverbial challenge of ‘the second novel’, and that it would be as well to have it on the stocks before the first one was published. My National Service was now far enough in the past for me to feel detached from it, and yet recent enough to be recalled in some detail, and I decided to use an ‘I’ narrator for this novel, to give it a documentary, truth-telling tone. The main formal problem was to construct a story that could stretch over the two-year span of National Service, without getting bogged down in the dull repetitive routine which was its defining characteristic. The most dramatic part of the experience was the rude shock of initiation into military life; after that one’s existence was always measured by the slow attenuation of the months, weeks and days before one escaped from it. My solution was to have the narrator, Jonathan Browne, recall his basic training in a series of retrospective episodes, framed by his last week in the Army, during which the banal nature of his employment is evoked. My own mild rebelliousness in basic training, and subsequent success in securing a cushy job at Bovington, I distributed between the two main characters: the impulsive, idealistic Catholic Mike Brady, who carries rebellion into violence, and the prudent, sardonic, agnostic Jonathan, who dissociates himself from his friend’s reckless behaviour, but is left with residual self-doubt. That they are both attracted to the same girl, Pauline, gives an extra tension to their relationship, and a twist in the plot brings Mike back to disturb the ritual of release from the Army that Jonathan had been looking forward to. Long after I published the novel I realised that I had borrowed this structure from Graham Greene’s The Quiet American, his Fowler, Pyle and Phuong corresponding to my Jonathan, Mike and Pauline. The ‘e’ at the end of Jonathan’s surname may have been inserted by my unconscious in acknowledgement of the debt. Perhaps there is also a pale trace in the relationship between my two main characters of that between Charles Ryder and Sebastian Flyte in Evelyn Waugh’s Brideshead Revisited, a novel with a first-person narrator and a frame story of military service. As these novels were both key texts in my thesis on the Catholic novel it is not surprising that I had assimilated their narrative strategies subliminally and reproduced them in writing about similar themes in a different milieu. Intertextuality is an inescapable element of writing, whether it is conscious or not. That useful word did not then exist, however. Coined in 1967 by the French academic Julia Kristeva, intertextualité belongs to a movement in the theory and practice of literary criticism that would seek to revolutionise the profession which I was about to enter.