I ADVERTISED IN the Birmingham Post for a suitable flat and in August I went there on my own to look at the most promising one of those that were offered, taking the steam train from Paddington to Snow Hill station, then the main route between the two cities. In my wallet I carried £100 in cash, having withdrawn virtually our entire savings from the Woolwich Building Society for ‘key money’. The rent of the flat was legally controlled and therefore very reasonable, but there was a black market in this kind of property which obliged one to pay a premium to the outgoing tenant, trusting that it would be recoverable in the same way when one left. I knew nothing of Birmingham apart from what I had gleaned from the half-mile walk between the station and the Arts Faculty of the University on my previous visit: a vague impression of old-fashioned office buildings, a soot-stained baroque church (St Philip’s) that seemed too small to be the Anglican cathedral of England’s second-largest city, and friendly natives whose accent I couldn’t understand when I asked them the way to Edmund Street. This time I was escorted from the city centre by an estate agent to an inner suburb called Handsworth. It was already a home for immigrant communities from the Indian subcontinent and the Caribbean, but it was not yet associated in the national media with riots, prostitution, drug dealing and other criminality. The flat was in a block probably built between the wars in a quiet residential street. It was shabby but spacious, with three bedrooms, the smallest of which I could use as a study instead of the corner of our bedroom which served that purpose in Battersea. Looking at the bus map of Birmingham, I calculated that the location was not more than half an hour from the University campus in Edgbaston, which seemed negligible travelling time to a Londoner; so I took the flat, without being able to consult Mary since we had no telephone, and next day, having spent the night in a gruesome commercial hotel, discreetly handed over my key money to the outgoing tenant in the estate agent’s office. When I got back to London there was a letter waiting for me, responding to my advertisement, offering us a suitable flat ten minutes’ walk from the University, with no key money required, and I deeply regretted having committed to the flat in Handsworth – all the more after we moved there and I caught the expressions of surprise and pity on colleagues’ faces when I told them where we were living.
Soon, however, this disappointment was overridden by the exciting novelty of my new job, shared to some extent by my colleagues, since they were moving into a brand-new building that was luxurious compared to the one in Edmund Street. Every member of the academic staff, even a temporary assistant lecturer, had their own office, with fitted bookshelves and cupboards, a desk and filing cabinet, and a table around which students could sit for tutorials and small classes. At the end of the corridor was a Senior Common Room with easy chairs where coffee and tea were served in the morning and afternoon. The Faculty of Arts was the last to move to the Edgbaston site, which had been astutely acquired at the beginning of the century by the first Chancellor of the University, the dynamic local politician Joseph Chamberlain. This part of Edgbaston, lying between the Hagley Road and Bristol Road arteries, is an unusual – perhaps unique – inner suburb of a large industrial city in having no commercial centre and a great deal of green open space, including a golf course, an artificial lake, a nature reserve and two botanical gardens. There are still parts of it where, standing only a mile from the city centre, you can’t see a single building for trees. Here, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, many of the industrialists who generated Birmingham’s wealth built fine houses to the west of their fuming factory chimneys, taking advantage of the prevailing wind. The Calthorpe Estate, which owned and managed the land, restricted later residential development and looked favourably on the University’s expansion. It was the ideal situation for a civic university, embedded in the city and yet occupying a quasi-pastoral bit of territory in its own right. At the hub of the campus Joseph Chamberlain’s initiative is memorialised in a phallic redbrick clock tower known locally as ‘Big Joe’, modelled on the Torre del Mangia in Siena, but taller – indeed, the tallest free-standing clock tower in the world. From the window of my room I looked out over the central grassed quadrangle, with the clock tower to my left and the massive redbrick Library built in the 1950s to my right, at a striking concrete-and-glass Staff House in the final stages of construction on the far side, designed by Sir Hugh Casson, who had general oversight of the architectural development of the campus. The University had an air of being well established and confident of its future. I knew I would be sorry to leave it after a year, but with the optimism of youth I did not brood on that prospect. Perhaps something would turn up to obviate it.
The ethos of the English Department was conservative and traditional. Several of the academic staff had been there since before the war, and I was the only one under the age of thirty-six. Historically the Department had been dominated by Ernest de Sélincourt, an authority on Wordsworth, who was its head from his appointment in 1909 till his retirement in the 1930s. I once interviewed the Birmingham-born novelist and critic Walter Allen, who had been taught by him, and asked what de Sélincourt was like as a teacher. Allen replied, ‘I thought he was a stuffy old bore’, and he looked it in the photographic portrait which hung on a wall in the Department. A product of Oxford himself, he ensured that the undergraduate syllabus followed the Oxford pattern. Undergraduates were required to study Old English for at least two years and final examinations in literature stopped at 1900. There was, however, a recently devised first-year lecture course, ‘Introduction to the Novel’, based on a long, slightly eccentric list of texts which extended into the twentieth century, and Terence Spencer asked me to give lectures on several of them including Henry James’s The Ambassadors and H.G. Wells’s Tono-Bungay. Like most young academics at the start of their careers, after two years of specialised postgraduate research I had to work hard filling the gaps in my knowledge to keep ahead of my students, but it was an enjoyable and stimulating workload. Both Tono-Bungay and The Ambassadors figured prominently in my first book of criticism, Language of Fiction, some years later.
In those days there was no instruction of new recruits to the academic profession on how to lecture or teach smaller groups. You just tried to imitate the best of your own former teachers and avoid the faults of the worst. It was not done for the senior staff to monitor the teaching of junior ones, still less that of their peers, so it was possible for someone lacking elementary communication skills to repeat their failures for an entire career without correction. I myself hadn’t really taken Mary’s comment on my British Council lectures to heart. I continued to write out my lectures in full, and they were usually too densely packed with information to be easily taken in through the ear, certainly in an uninterrupted discourse of fifty minutes. Research has established that the maximum attention span of auditors of such discourse is about twenty minutes, after which it comes and goes in spasms. Much later in my career I began to experiment with the form of a lecture, using visual aids and handouts, and inviting questions to break up the relentless flow of information, but by that time I was getting deaf and had difficulty hearing the questions. Nowadays at Birmingham, and I presume at other universities, newly appointed junior members of staff are required to attend courses provided by the Education Faculty on lecturing technique and other aspects of teaching. This does not necessarily solve the problem – a formulaic PowerPoint presentation that ponderously repeats information summarised on a screen can be deadly boring. Originality, enthusiasm, charisma and wit, which all effective teachers must possess in some measure, cannot be taught.
The liveliest teaching in the Department when I joined it was in medieval literature, led by Derek Brewer and Geoffrey Shepherd, who went out of their way to welcome me. They were in their late thirties and both had served in the armed forces during the war. Derek later moved to Cambridge, where he became Professor of Medieval Literature and Master of Emmanuel College. Geoffrey was eventually given a personal chair at Birmingham, and inspired a special devotion in those he taught. They ran a dialogic seminar together on Friday afternoons for second- and third-year students, and waves of laughter emanating from the packed seminar room attested to its popularity. Another member of staff who quickly became a good friend was Elsie Duncan-Jones, wife of Austin Duncan-Jones, the Head of the Philosophy Department. She had been one of the Cambridge undergraduates who took part in the legendary classes of I.A. Richards from which he drew the material of his seminal book Practical Criticism (1929), and at a young age she had published the first monograph on the poetry of Gerard Manley Hopkins. Subsequently she published little, subordinating her career to her husband’s, but she was immensely well read in English literature, major and minor, up to the twentieth century. She had a grace and elegance that made it hard to believe she came from a very humble rural background in the West Country. I always associated her with To the Lighthouse, for she combined the intelligence and literary acumen of Virginia Woolf with the sensitive concern of Mrs Ramsay for her children, friends and rather aloof philosopher-husband. Elsie must have been a beauty in youth and was comely in middle age. Her warm, sympathetic personality invited confidences, and I was not the first or the last young man to fall under her spell and value her friendship, which we kept up after she retired until her death.
Terence Spencer was something of an enigma to one and all. He had left UCL shortly after Mary and I graduated, to take up the chair of English at Queen’s University Belfast, but stayed there only three years before moving to Birmingham. He had ambition, and Birmingham gave him scope to exercise it. He was not only Head of Department, at a time when heads had almost autocratic power (‘the Barons’ was how he liked to refer to his peers in the Arts Faculty), but also Director of the Shakespeare Institute in Stratford-upon-Avon, founded by his predecessor, Allardyce Nicoll. This postgraduate institute for research into Shakespeare and his contemporaries occupied Mason Croft, the former home of the novelist Marie Corelli, a charming old house in spacious grounds just a few minutes’ walk from Shakespeare’s birthplace and the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. Though the ambience was appropriate, the Fellows and students were twenty-odd miles away from the intellectual life and library resources of the Edgbaston campus, and Spencer planned to bring the Institute back to Birmingham, while hanging on to Mason Croft as a venue for extramural courses and conferences. When the new Staff House was completed he arranged to move the Institute into Westmere, a Victorian mansion close to the campus which had been the Staff Club. With the bait of an honorary degree, he successfully wooed Eugene Black, President of the World Bank, for a handsome contribution to the cost of this project, and the Institute flourished in its new location, which of course was much more convenient for its director. It became the academic base of the Penguin Shakespeare, of which he was General Editor, with considerable powers of patronage. (Two decades later it moved back to Stratford, under the directorship of Stanley Wells, partly to ward off a threat from the University of Warwick to set up a rival institute there.)
One of the mysteries of Terence Spencer was how, although his range of knowledge was undoubtedly impressive, he achieved his eminence without very much to show in terms of published scholarship. His only book, sifting through a very large swathe of English literature, was Fair Greece, Sad Relic: literary philhellenism from Shakespeare to Byron (1954), which he would wryly refer to as ‘Fair Greece, Sad Remainder’ in acknowledgement of its limited fame; and for the subject of his Inaugural Lecture at Birmingham he chose two authors not normally studied in English departments, though perhaps they should be: Edward Gibbon and Charles Darwin. His later published works, in no great abundance, were editions of texts and periodical articles. But he was far from idle: his energies were consumed in organising and directing the work of others and by a wide range of high-level academic activities at home and abroad. I never saw him without a book or a file in his hand, as if he always read as he ran. His colleagues in the Department respected his learning, but they did not love him, and most did not much like him. He was a tall man, with a large balding head that seemed to bulge with knowledge, and a full-fleshed face that was faintly cratered with pockmarks like the surface of the moon. At close quarters he could make people feel uneasy. He had a habit, which some found intimidating, of calling male colleagues ‘Brother’ and clamping a heavy hand on their shoulders to keep them stationary while he delivered himself of some opinion or advice. But I doubt if he ever tried that on John Russell Brown, who was just as tall as Spencer, younger, and the most dashing figure among the staff. He was a Shakespeare specialist, focusing especially on the plays in performance, and took a practical interest in the Drama Society of the Student Guild (i.e. Union), directing some of their productions and inspiring a number of students in the Department, including Terry Hands and Peter James, who went on to have successful careers in the theatre, before he left to be head of a new department in the Faculty, of Drama and Theatre Arts.
I can’t remember when I discovered whose place in the English Department I was temporarily filling. It may have been as late as halfway through the spring term of 1961, when Terence Spencer told me this person was not, after all, going to take up his appointment at Birmingham. He was Laurence Lerner, who had been a colleague of Spencer’s at Queen’s, Belfast, and he had decided to go to the new University of Sussex instead. I didn’t know much about him, but I blessed him for his decision when I heard of it, and for long afterwards, because it created a vacancy for which I was eligible. In fact Terence said at once that he wanted to keep me on. He had consulted colleagues, and he did not bother to advertise the post and interview other candidates. Such was the power of an academic Baron. I was soon officially informed that I had been appointed assistant lecturer, on two years’ probation from the following October, my present appointment counting as one of the normal three. It is hard to exaggerate the importance of this piece of luck or the intensity of my relief. ‘Probation’ in those days was a threshold you could only fail to cross if you were seriously incompetent or delinquent – very different from the rigorous competition for tenure in American universities. In effect I had obtained a secure position in the profession of my choice at one of its major institutions, without ever satisfying a normal appointment committee. In fact I would rise to the rank of full professor without ever doing so, since I chose to stay at Birmingham for the rest of my academic career, and on the few occasions when I applied or was invited to apply for chairs in other universities, I was never offered one.
Now that I was an established member of staff I took a keen interest in departmental meetings, which were novel enough not to bore and irritate me as they did my colleagues. Spencer was not a good chairman of these occasions and let people argue without check. Sometimes I suspected that he did so deliberately, knowing that they would eventually cancel out each other’s views and allow him to act as he wanted. There was one person whom he could always rely on to provoke others, and that was I.A. Shapiro, familiarly known as ‘Ship’. He was one of the oldest members of staff, a graduate of Birmingham, with a goatee which wagged as he enunciated his opinions in slow-paced declarative sentences. He had spread frustration and fury in the academic world well beyond Birmingham. As a very promising young scholar before the war, he had been given an enviable commission to edit the letters of John Donne for Oxford University Press. He took many years over the task, and when it was approaching completion the unique copy of his manuscript with all his notes and references was stolen in a bag taken from his car. He had to start again from the beginning, but progress was slow, if in fact he had made any progress, perhaps being so traumatised by the catastrophe that the project was in mental lockdown. At any rate, he had failed to produce the edition for which Donne specialists and other Renaissance scholars had been waiting impatiently for two decades, and continued to disappoint them, defying all attempts by OUP to cancel his contract and give the task to someone else until the end of his long life in 2004. He was actually a very kind, civilised man at heart, but stubbornly convinced of the rightness of his own opinions on everything.
Department meetings concerned with examinations were of particular interest to me, having previously been on the other side of the wall that separates examiners from examinees. In the spring term the staff assembled to approve the Finals examination papers, and we went through them question by question, emending them if necessary, an opportunity to display learning, pedantry and wit which few could resist, so that several adjournments and new meetings with diminishing attendance were required to complete the process. The climax of the academic year was the week of the Examiners’ Meeting in June, when we sat in conclave round a long table piled with marked scripts to decide whether students who had failed first-year examinations should be allowed to resit them, and to determine the class of each finalist’s degree in the presence of an external examiner, who adjudicated on marginal or disputed marks. At London the scripts of Finals candidates were identified by a number not a name, and the examiners were selected from several different colleges, so assessment was genuinely impersonal. I was surprised and slightly shocked at first by the intimacy of the process at Birmingham, where every candidate was well known to most of the staff, and tutors would often plead for their tutees, if their marks had been unexpectedly disappointing, by revealing difficult personal circumstances. There was, however, a professional ethic, personified in the external examiner, which ensured that on the whole justice was done. What was surprising, perhaps, was the unexamined consensus on what qualities, or lack of them, in the short essays that literature examinations mostly required, corresponded to the various marks, on a scale from alpha plus (exceedingly rare) to gamma double minus, which cumulatively determined the degree class of a candidate. These qualities certainly couldn’t be quantified, and if we had been asked to define them in order of priority I doubt whether there would ever have been unanimity; but generally the Finals results corresponded to most people’s estimates of the ability and industry of the students they had taught. There were some lucky, or unlucky, exceptions, and for the latter in those days there was no realistic possibility of appeal.
In the Easter vacation I attended the annual conference of University Teachers of English, which was hosted by a different university each year and in 1961 was held in Cambridge. This was an exciting experience for me, an opportunity to meet and mingle with a broad cross-section of the profession I now belonged to, and to hear some of its stars do their stuff when they gave papers at the plenary sessions, such as Frank Kermode, then Head of English at Manchester, and an American visitor from Yale, W.K. Wimsatt. Wimsatt was a giant of a man, for whom the lectern had to be artificially raised. I had never heard of him, but quickly learned that he was a leading theorist of the American New Criticism, and especially well known for a very influential article written with a colleague, the philosopher Monroe C. Beardsley, called ‘The Intentional Fallacy’, which I looked up when I got home. Its argument, which struck at the heart of much historical and biographical scholarship, was that the attempt to interpret a literary work by reference to the author’s intention is vain because the only intention that is relevant is the one encoded in the language of the work itself. In a way it was a counter-intuitive theory, because nobody writes anything, from a letter to a novel, without an intention to do so, but it is also true that the meaning of such texts always inevitably differs from what the authors might formulate in advance of their composition or might offer by way of explanation afterwards. I found this idea encouraging to my own germinating plan for a study of the language of fiction.
As well as many new acquaintances, I made a new friend at the conference: Bernard Bergonzi, who had recently been appointed at Manchester by Frank Kermode. He sought me out because he had recently read The Picturegoers, through an interesting chain of events. His sister-in-law, Bernadine Wall, had achieved some fame the previous year when, a Cambridge undergraduate, she was selected to give evidence at the Lady Chatterley trial as a witness to the novel’s non-corrupting effect on an intelligent young woman who was also a practising Catholic. She had subsequently written a novel drawing on the life of her cultured Catholic family (her father, Bernard Wall, edited a periodical, The Twentieth Century, and her mother, Barbara, was a novelist), which she submitted to MacGibbon & Kee. Though they did not take it, they sent her a copy of The Picturegoers, and she passed it to Bernard. He read it with great interest, partly because he immediately recognised the location of the story as the bit of south-east London where he had spent his own Catholic boyhood. We had in fact grown up in neighbouring parishes, he in Lewisham and I in Brockley, unaware of each other’s existence. Bernard was older than me by five or six years. His education was interrupted and hampered by illness in childhood, and he went to Wadham College, Oxford, not by the conventional route, but as a mature student via Ruskin College. By the time I met him he had a growing reputation as a contributor of essays and reviews to various journals on modern and contemporary literature, and was a published poet in the Movement vein. At the Cambridge conference he introduced me to Frank Kermode and as a result I found myself sitting with a group late one evening in somebody’s room, sipping whisky out of teacups and bathroom mugs, listening to Frank discoursing in his relaxed, drily amusing style. Unfortunately I cannot recall anything he said on that occasion except his enjoyment of the drive down from Manchester in his Mini, then a new and trendy vehicle; but in time he would become an inspiration to me as a critic and a personal friend.1 Bernard became a closer friend, especially after he moved to the new University of Warwick in the late sixties. Bernadine, whom I met a few times at Bernard’s home, wrote several novels in two groups with a lengthy gap between them. Unexpected Lessons in Love, published in 2013, the year of her death, treated the experience of bowel cancer both wittily and movingly, and was posthumously shortlisted for the Orange Prize.
I cannot recall anything of particular interest Mary did in that academic year 1960–61, and neither, I’m afraid, can she. I was having all the fun. The University Wives’ Club provided some agreeable social gatherings for those with young children, but living in Handsworth and dependent on buses for transport, she was not able easily to develop the friendships she made, and she spent most of her days looking after Julia and the flat, with shopping excursions to the Soho Road, where the ladies loitering on street corners in all weathers excited even Julia’s infant curiosity. Now that my future at Birmingham was secure, I was impatient to move from Handsworth to somewhere near the University when our lease on the flat expired, and we started to look for a small house with a garden. We were hampered by our lack of savings for a deposit and the building societies’ insistence on a prudent ratio of income to mortgage, but eventually we found a very small two-bedroomed semi-detached house in Selly Oak which we could afford, with a long narrow garden that backed on to a drained reservoir – hence its address, Reservoir Road. Its great attraction to me was that it was within comfortable walking distance of the University, which could also be reached by bus from the end of the road. We viewed the house on a sunny day when the garden looked quite inviting, and suppressed our doubts about its mean proportions and cheap-looking build. When I inspected the bathroom I observed a turd floating in the toilet bowl, which I should have taken as a warning that the house was crap.
The houses in Reservoir Road were examples of the worst kind of jerry-built inter-war semis. I was told by long-term residents in the street that they cost only £250 when new, and that the first few had to be knocked down when half built because the contractors had omitted to provide them with external doorways. This story was plausible because the front door to every house was, unusually, at the side. It opened on to an area, too small to merit the term ‘hall’, between the two ground-floor rooms, and the staircase went straight up in front of you as you entered, passing under the beams of the first floor. When we moved in it proved impossible to get our double bed up the staircase, and it had to be taken away, sawn in half and converted into a hinged bed, while we slept on the mattress in the meantime: not an auspicious start to our residence. We also found that the previous owners had stripped every removable object, including curtain rails, light bulbs and most of the rose bushes, from the property when they departed. It soon became apparent that the man of the house had been a DIY enthusiast whose attempts to improve it had generally made it worse. The rear ground-floor room was designed as a kitchen–dining room, but had been partitioned to make two rooms inconveniently small for their respective purposes. Like the vast majority of British houses at that time, it had no central heating, was poorly insulated and had single-glazed windows which frosted up inside on cold winter nights. The front room doubled as our lounge and my study, with a desk in one corner, so in that respect we had taken a step backwards in domestic amenities.
Several weeks had passed since I sent Ginger to Timothy O’Keeffe without any response from him, and I was beginning to get anxious. In September, just before handing back the keys to the vacated flat and recovering my key money, I paid one last visit to check if there was any mail there, and indeed there was a letter from Tim O’Keeffe. He apologised for the delay, explaining that the firm had been in upheaval following the disappearance of its owner, Howard Samuel, who was observed walking into the sea on holiday one day and never seen again – a mystery that remained unsolved. Tim was ‘glad to say’ that they would publish the novel with an advance of £125, of which £75 would be paid on signature and the balance on publication. It was a less-than-generous offer considering the modest success of The Picturegoers, the paperback rights of which had been bought by Pan Books, but I was too relieved to argue. He said that Simon King, the new head of the firm, would read the book and might have some editorial suggestions for improvement. I have no memory of King’s comments, but they may have prompted me to add another narrative frame to the novel before publication, in which Jonathan, whom some readers found an unsympathetic narrator, introduces the story of his National Service, describes the sequel, and conveys an awareness of his self-centredness and his efforts to become a more generous person. It seems to me now, however, that the real weakness of the book is the characterisation of Mike Brady, whose motivation is never entirely convincing.
Not long after we moved to the Reservoir Road house its limitations became more obvious when Mary proved to be pregnant again. The house would soon feel even smaller, and Mary’s hopes of returning to teaching one day were further postponed. Still, we reflected, we didn’t want Julia to be an only child, two years was a good interval between siblings, and perhaps it was as well to get the early parenting over and done with. So we were not too cast down by another failure of the so-called Safe Method. Mary was now less isolated from other university wives than she had been at Handsworth, and began to form friendships with neighbours. I was happily employed in the Department, especially with teaching a new optional course on modern literature for final-year students that Terence Spencer had planned to give to Laurence Lerner. I was also seeking new ways to make extra money by writing. I had submitted a few articles in the past to The Tablet, the most cultured of Catholic weekly publications, which were turned down by the literary editor, Maryvonne Butcher, a formidable lady of forthright views. However, she had been impressed by The Picturegoers, and invited me to review books for the journal, which I was very pleased to do. Later, through Bernard Bergonzi’s recommendation, I began reviewing fiction regularly for The Spectator, which paid more and sent me a dozen new novels from which to choose five or six. Any I didn’t wish to keep I could sell to a dealer in London for half the cover price. One of those I kept was John McGahern’s debut, The Barracks, which I was greatly impressed by and compared to Joyce’s Dubliners. McGahern wrote to thank me for the review, and in a later letter said he had tried to buy The Picturegoers but discovered it was banned in Ireland, and had to wait till he came to England to obtain a copy. Whether it was the novel’s treatment of sex or of Catholicism that offended the notoriously philistine Irish censorship board, I do not know – perhaps both.
An element in Terence Spencer’s expansionist plans for the Department was to appoint a specialist in American literature who could teach a course in that subject and also contribute to the English Literature syllabus. He obtained approval and funding from the appropriate quarter, and the post was advertised. Perhaps regarding me as in some sense his protégé, he occasionally took me into his confidence, and one day he drew me into his office to show me an application for the new post from a man called Malcolm Bradbury. When I had scanned it, he said, ‘I don’t think we need interview anyone else, do you?’ and I agreed without hesitation. Bradbury was a little more than two years older than me, and the idea of having a colleague in my own age group was attractive, especially one with a CV as intriguing as his. A product of West Bridgford Grammar School, Nottingham, he had a First-class BA from University College Leicester at the time when its students took the London External degree examinations, and an MA from Queen Mary College London, so our education had followed very similar paths. After that, however, they diverged: he had spent two separate years in American universities on a fellowship and as an instructor, had begun a PhD on American literary expatriates at Manchester University, and was currently a tutor in the Department of Extra-Mural Studies at Hull. He had an interestingly varied list of publications to his name, including a good deal of journalism and a novel, Eating People is Wrong, published in 1959, which I knew of, but had not read. Of course I read it, and of course Malcolm read The Picturegoers, before he arrived with his wife Elizabeth in Birmingham in January 1962.
Being a comic-satirical campus novel set at a provincial redbrick university, Eating People is Wrong (a title taken from a well-known comic song of the time, ‘The Reluctant Cannibal’ by Michael Flanders and Donald Swann) was inevitably bracketed by reviewers with Lucky Jim, and it does have features in common with Amis’s book, notably some farcical set pieces; but, as I realised much later, it owed more to the example of early American campus novels, especially Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe and Randall Jarrell’s Pictures from an Institution, in which the comedy is more intellectual and morally complex. An epigraph from Epictetus defining the vocation of a philosopher sets the tone. Unusually in a first novel by a young writer, the central character is in early middle age. Professor Henry Treece embodies a theme on which Malcolm played several variations in his career: the plight of the liberal humanist who discovers he is an impotent spectator of, and sometimes involuntary collaborator in, the illiberal machinations of others in the society to which he belongs. Succumbing to the charms of a pretty postgraduate, Treece drives a gifted but unstable student into madness, and is punished by being hospitalised at the end of the novel, a black-comic episode which drew on Malcolm’s own experience. As a young man he was diagnosed with a serious heart condition, thought he was going to die, and wrote the first draft of Eating People in the shadow of that fear; but happily he made a full recovery after undergoing one of the first successful hole-in-the-heart operations performed in England. His first novel was more mature and poised than mine, and I was impressed by its sparkling wit and range of intellectual reference. Malcolm probably found the religious themes in my novel more difficult to relate to, for his outlook was essentially secular, but he relished my parodic representation of popular culture, and his subsequent encouragement of the comic strain that was present but subdued in my first two novels is my greatest debt to him.
We quickly became friends, as did Mary and Elizabeth. I have described our relationship at some length in another book, and I cannot convey its nature more economically than by quoting a few passages from that account.
Close friendships between writers have a special character, especially when they are formed fairly early in their careers, when both parties are developing their work, showing it to each other, discussing it, perhaps collaborating on it . . . Inevitably there is an element of competitiveness in such a relationship, which can cause some tension later, but at this early stage it is a constructive rivalry, as between two athletes specialising in the same events who train together. For three academic years . . . I enjoyed that kind of relationship with Malcolm continuously. We saw each other nearly every day at the University in term time, had offices on the same corridor, took coffee together in the Senior Common Room and shared lunch in Staff House. There was always much to talk about: new books, new writing projects, departmental politics . . . Several post-war British novelists began their careers with a ‘day-job’ teaching in a university, but most of them gave it up as soon as they felt able to do so. Malcolm and I were unusual in being equally committed and ambitious in our academic and creative careers. This was partly because the life of a freelance writer simply seemed too risky, especially for a married man with a family (Mary and I had two children by 1962 and the Bradburys had their first the following year) but it was also because we were genuinely interested in the academic study of literature, and wanted to make our mark on it. So we set ourselves up for a very busy life, combining teaching, writing and reviewing scholarly books and articles, with writing novels, short stories, and in due course, scripts for stage, radio and TV, as well as doing a good deal of journalism, including regular reviewing . . . We would not have been able to maintain this tempo of work if we had not married on the pre-Women’s Lib assumption that the husband was the breadwinner whose work had priority and the woman the housewife and mother whose career was suspended during the early years of childbearing.2
Malcolm’s versatility, his ability to shift from one genre and one stylistic register to another, contributing regularly, for instance, to both Punch and the Critical Quarterly, inspired imitation. Perceiving that useful supplementary income could be obtained from the lighter kind of writing, I placed a few humorous pieces in Punch and The Tablet myself.
1962 was an eventful year in many ways, personally, professionally and publicly. There was a spell of extremely cold weather over Christmas and the New Year, and when we returned to Reservoir Road from a visit to Mum and Dad we had some difficulty in opening the outside door because it was frozen to the door frame. Being a novice house-owner, I had omitted to turn off the mains water supply before our departure, and the storage tank in the loft and the pipes in the house had frozen and burst. Their contents had thawed and leaked and frozen again. Water had cascaded down the stairs to form an icy lake of congealed mail and late Christmas cards on the doormat, and had poured down the walls in the dining room behind the wallpaper and frozen, forming blisters which crackled when you pressed them. From the toilet bowl I removed a perfectly formed ice sculpture in the shape of an oversized meerschaum pipe.
We were rescued by a small family building firm recommended by neighbours – cheerful and helpful folk very appropriately called Godbyhere – and they carried out the necessary repairs and redecoration promptly. I was not insured against this kind of mishap, and the cost nearly wiped me out financially. There came a day when I had only £40 in my bank account. I went to see Terence Spencer and told him I needed a pay rise. He was sympathetic and said he would see what he could do. I did get a small rise, and better still I was told in March that I would be promoted to lecturer from 1st October. At about the same time the editor in charge of literary fiction at Pan Books wrote to say that they planned to publish the paperback edition of The Picturegoers in October, when another advance would be payable, and he casually mentioned that he had read Ginger in typescript and agreed to publish it. That was the first I had heard of this welcome news. When I enquired of my current editor at MacGibbon & Kee, Martin Green, he wrote apologetically, ‘Our agreement with Pan books was signed on 21 September last year . . . I assumed you were told.’ I was too diffident to complain, but I accepted Malcolm’s advice that I should get an agent. He introduced me to his own, Graham Watson, a director of Curtis Brown, one of the leading London agencies, who took me on. Graham could not, of course, do anything about the terms for Ginger, You’re Barmy, but looked forward to representing me with my next novel.
Ever since we arrived in Birmingham, Park Honan had been writing his long, racy letters, complaining of the suffocating atmosphere of life in a small town and small women’s college – citing, for example, his colleagues’ disapproval when he organised a not-for-credit reading group for students on the work of James Joyce which proved very popular. He was determined to move from Connecticut College and in January ’62 wrote to say that he had obtained a post at Brown, one of the prestigious Ivy League universities, which would begin in the fall. He had also applied for a Guggenheim Fellowship to do post-doctoral research in England, though with little hope of getting it so early in his career. In March he informed me that he had just ordered forty-three copies of The Picturegoers for the Connecticut College bookstore, explaining that sophomore students were required to read one good contemporary novel in the May reading week, and he had made mine the set text. He invited me to submit some questions for the exam they would have to sit, and promised to send me the better papers for my comment. I presumed that as he was leaving the college he didn’t care what his colleagues thought of his unusual choice, and gratefully thanked him for the boost to my sales. In early April he announced that to his surprise and delight he had been awarded a ‘Guggie’ and, as Brown was willing to postpone the commencement of his appointment, the Honans would be coming to Europe in June for a whole year. A second letter dated the same day congratulated us on news just received – the birth of our second child, Stephen, whom he promptly nicknamed ‘Dedalus’.
Stephen was born at home with the assistance of a midwife by Mary’s wish, so that she could practise natural childbirth without interference from hospital staff and with my co-operation. Unfortunately he arrived suddenly, four weeks earlier than expected, in the Easter vacation, while I was away from home with Malcolm, attending two conferences held successively in Hull and London. At the latter I was called out of the first morning’s session to receive a telephoned message that I was a father again. I hastened home immediately, relieved that mother and child were well, and pleased that the baby was a boy, but deeply disappointed that I had missed the birth. Apparently the labour had been even quicker than on the previous occasion and there was no way I could have been summoned home in time. Fortunately Mary’s mother had come to stay with her while I was away, so she had had a helper in addition to the excellent midwife. Mrs Jacob declared that she had never seen a baby born before, because the doctors who delivered her own had always instructed her to close her eyes, and it had been an amazing revelation to her. Stephen was almost a premature baby, and certainly a small one, but sound and healthy.
When Stephen was baptised his godmother was Mary’s youngest sister, Margaret, who was a student in the English Department, now in her second year. At the time she had applied I administered the interviewing of candidates for admission, which put me in a moral dilemma: should I reveal to my colleagues that Margaret was my sister-in-law or not? I decided I should not, but allocated her to Elsie Duncan-Jones, who I thought would be a sympathetic interviewer. Fortunately Elsie recommended acceptance. She reproached me later for not telling her of the connection, but it was bound to come out, and I was happy that I could not be accused of nepotism, nor Margaret of benefiting from it. We saw a good deal of her in term time, and also of her boyfriend, Ioan Williams, who was reading English at St Catherine’s College, Oxford. He was of Welsh parentage but brought up in Hertfordshire near Hoddesdon, and they had met on the day of our wedding, when Margaret went to a dance in the town that evening wearing her bridesmaid’s dress. Ioan had the build of a Welsh miner and the face, Elsie told Margaret when she met him, of an angel. He was as chastely and possessively in love with Margaret as I had been with Mary at the same age, and also as academically competitive. When he visited Margaret at weekends he picked my brains for his tutorial essays, and argued with a pertinacity that I sometimes found exhausting. I was not surprised when in due course he was awarded a First, after paying to dictate his copious but illegible Finals papers to a typist under invigilation – a facility we did not offer candidates at Birmingham.
At the beginning of August ’62 the death of Marilyn Monroe from barbiturate poisoning dominated the media on a scale not equalled until the death of Princess Diana decades later. Like most men of my generation, I had always found her an extraordinarily attractive and fascinating figure on the screen, beautiful, seductive and yet somehow innocent, who magnetised one’s attention even in the ropiest film. The pathos of her suicide – the fact that a woman who was idolised, envied, and in fantasy desired by millions should be so unhappy and lacking in self-esteem that she took her own life – prompted me to write a poem, a form of literary expression I very seldom tried after adolescence, called ‘Epitaph for a Film Star’.
Passing the hoarding where she was displayed,
From which destructive nails had peeled
Long ragged strips of irregular depth,
(Breast and buttock in the gutter fade)
One glimpsed beneath the wounds she smiled above,
Fragments of other images, appeals:
A baby’s limb, a page half-turned,
Ban the – Save the – Dancing – Love.
Now eyes and speculation stick
Where nails have scraped through to the stark brick.
I sent it speculatively to Ron Bryden, literary editor of The Spectator, and to my surprise he liked it enough to publish it, in the issue of 19th October. ‘It’s a marvellous image for her and all of them,’ he wrote. About twenty years later I was invited by Richard Adams, the author of the bestselling children’s book Watership Down, to contribute to an anthology he was editing of poems by well-known writers who were not recognised poets. It was called Occasional Poets, published by Viking in 1986, and included work by nearly fifty authors, including Alan Ayckbourn, Beryl Bainbridge, C.S. Lewis, William Golding, Doris Lessing – and Malcolm. I suspected that Adams had dreamed up the idea in order to get his own poetry into print prominently but unpretentiously, and no doubt the rest of us were pleased to collaborate for the same reason. I submitted four poems, written at long intervals, including the one on the death of Monroe. Reviewing the book rather disdainfully in The Observer, Blake Morrison, himself an established poet, commented that ‘the shadow of Philip Larkin’s “Sunny Prestatyn” falls heavily over David Lodge’s “Epitaph for a Film Star”.’ It was true that Larkin used the image of a defaced poster depicting a beautiful young woman rather similarly in his poem, but a little research revealed that in fact ‘Sunny Prestatyn’ had been published after mine, in the London Magazine in January 1963. I had the satisfaction of pointing this out in a letter to The Observer the following weekend, concluding, ‘I do not, of course, suggest that the shadow fell the other way.’ Blake subsequently sent me an apologetic note.
At the beginning of the new academic year the Birmingham English Department acquired a second professor, Richard Hoggart. The appointment had been made some time before, but his arrival had been postponed at his request because he felt he had obligations to the University of Leicester, to which he had moved only a few years earlier from Hull, where he occupied the position in the Extra-Mural Department that Malcolm took over. (Small world.) He had been head-hunted by Birmingham and needed some persuasion to leave Leicester, where he was very happy as a senior lecturer. Eventually he accepted the appointment on condition that he could set up a postgraduate institute in a new subject area called Cultural Studies, which would combine the methods of literary criticism and sociology and apply them to the whole range of contemporary cultural production in different media and milieux.
It was a shrewd appointment by Birmingham. It was the beginning of the sixties, in a cultural as well as chronological sense, when old disciplinary boundaries would collapse and the mass media would become vehicles of cultural innovation. Richard was a rising intellectual star popular with progressive staff and students in universities, especially those who, like himself, came from the lower end of the British class system, and The Uses of Literacy was never out of print. He had been one of the most effective witnesses for the defence in the Lady Chatterley trial of 1960 which, more than any other single event, freed writers to describe sexual behaviour explicitly, and an influential member of the Pilkington Committee which met in the same year to consider the future of broadcasting, and successfully defended the BBC’s charter for public service broadcasting against the commercial interests of independent television. Richard himself was not a radical in politics, methodology or morals. In many ways his values were old-fashioned, those of the self-respecting working class he had celebrated in his book, and his critical method was intuitive and suspicious of theory. But the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies which he set up became a powerhouse of innovative research, engendering similar graduate programmes and eventually undergraduate degrees in cultural studies at other universities. Much of that development occurred in the 1970s and ’80s, under the stewardship of Stuart Hall, after Richard had left Birmingham. But he was the ‘onlie begetter’ of the Centre, which had an influence and reputation out of all proportion to its modest size and resources, until for various reasons it ceased to exist in the less sympathetic academic climate of the next century.
In the autumn of 1962 all that was hidden in the mists of the future. What was immediately clear was that Richard was an exceptionally nice man, honest, decent and caring in all spheres of his life, and prodigiously industrious. Although his priority was to establish the Centre on a firm foundation (with financial help from Allen Lane, owner of Penguin Books), and he was drawn into much faculty and university committee work, he made sure that he tutored some undergraduates from the first year upwards, to keep in touch with English as a living, developing discipline. He was small in stature, and confessed poignantly in his autobiography that the only thing he regretted in his life was that he hadn’t been a few inches taller; but he made up for the lack of an imposing physical presence by his energy, sincerity and a verbal fluency which, like his prose, was not that of the cultural mandarin class but salted with humour, homely analogies and slightly old-fashioned colloquialisms. Most people immediately felt at ease with him, as they did not with Terence Spencer, and it soon became evident that the two professors did not get on with each other. It was another enigma posed by Spencer: he must have strongly supported the effort to lure Richard to Birmingham – indeed it is likely that he instigated it – but why? The two men had nothing in common, personally or intellectually, and this must have been evident to Spencer as soon as they met. If he imagined that Richard would be content to defer to him out of gratitude for the appointment, he made a grave mistake. In the incompatibility of the two men lay the seeds of trouble in departmental politics during the increasingly turbulent Sixties.
One of the main issues discussed at the Lady Chatterley trial in which Richard had figured was the legitimacy of Lawrence’s frequent use of the words ‘fuck’ and ‘cunt’, the argument of the defence being that the novelist was seeking to redeem them from vulgar usage in an honest celebration of sexual love. But the effect of the verdict was also to permit the printing of these words as mere expletives, in order to give colloquial dialogue in fiction authenticity. This was a matter very relevant to Ginger, You’re Barmy, which was mostly written before the trial. I had decided to follow Norman Mailer’s example in The Naked and the Dead, rendering the soldier’s favourite expletive as ‘fugg’ and the vulgar term for vagina by a ‘c’ followed by a dash, which was curiously elongated by MacGibbon & Kee’s printer so that it looked more like an eight-letter than a four-letter word. I did not venture to change my text in the light of the trial, but even so I felt it necessary to preface the book with a warning to readers who might be offended. By 1970, when a second paperback edition of the novel was issued by a different publisher, Panther, this note looked exceedingly quaint. I deleted it, and took the opportunity to have the four-letter words printed in full. It was a strange experience to sit down with a copy of my own novel and, like some conscientious vandaliser of library books, inscribe obscene expletives in the margin of nearly every page for the printer. When I read the new paperback I found that the explicitness was distracting, because it didn’t match the general reticence of the novel’s style, and when it was reissued again, in 1982, by Secker & Warburg, the original version was used with the expletives bowdlerised, as seemed appropriate in what was by then a period piece.
Ginger, You’re Barmy was due to be published early in November. In late October the Cuban Missile Crisis came to a head. Having discovered that Russia was building missile sites on Cuba, the USA blockaded the island, which the Soviet Premier Khrushchev described in an open letter to President Kennedy on the 24th of October as an act of aggression threatening to cause a nuclear war. ‘Just my luck to be publishing a novel as the third world war breaks out,’ I said to Malcolm and Elizabeth when they invited us round to their flat for a meal. The flippancy concealed a genuine anxiety – the whole world held its breath in those few days – but I was not as terrified as many people were at the time. I always thought that nuclear catastrophe would more likely happen by accident than by a deliberate decision to engage in mutually assured destruction. (At this time of writing, given the alarming political situation in the Middle East, I am not so sure.) Happily the Soviets backed down, and the Cuban crisis passed into history a few weeks before my novel was published.
Its reception was, as the trade says, ‘mixed’, which means for the author disappointing. Only the anonymous TLS reviewer offered unqualified praise. Most saw some merit in the book but complained of the flatness of the prose and the unsympathetic character of the narrator. Christopher Ricks in the New Statesman rightly questioned the characterisation of Mike Brady, but having done National Service himself ‘found the total recall agreeably unnerving’. Older ex-soldiers were inclined to share Anthony Burgess’s reaction: ‘David Lodge speaks the truth about this sad limbo of a cold-war army, but it’s not a new truth, nor is it newly illuminated . . . Get some in lad: your number’s not dry.’ But he was kind enough to add, ‘Now that he’s purged these two nasty wasteful years, he’ll write, I prophesy, something to make us really sit up.’ All in all, I felt I had scraped through the test of the second novel, and began to make notes for a third, based on and around my holiday in Germany in 1951.
1 See my essay, ‘Frank Remembered – by a Kermodian’, in Lives in Writing (2014).
2 ‘Malcolm Bradbury: Writer and Friend’, Lives in Writing (2014)