THE WINTER OF 1963 was even colder than the previous year’s. There was heavy snow, and then a period of exceptionally low temperatures which lasted through January and February. It was so cold in Birmingham that the water froze not only in the internal plumbing of houses but also in the mains pipes deep in the earth under the roads, and many homes were without water for several weeks. Warned by our experience of the previous year we managed to keep our rabbit hutch warm and dry, its small size becoming an asset in the arctic weather. I was astonished when the Vice-Chancellor of the University, Sir Robert Aitken, whose tall, distinguished figure matched his elevated position, called at our house one day during the great freeze. Standing on the trodden snow in our side way, with his chauffeured limousine waiting in the street, and to my relief declining to come inside, he invited us to a dinner party at his official residence a few days hence. It was short notice and we had no telephone, but it seemed an extraordinary visitation. As I thanked him I remembered that he had seemed rather taken with Mary recently at some university function and decided he must have desired her presence at his dining table strongly enough to call in person. I did not suspect him of any more predatory motive. We enjoyed the dinner and the drinks before and after, served with some ceremony by a team of servants in the spacious and well-heated house on Edgbaston Park Road, but I felt embarrassed that the VC had been put to such trouble to invite us. Soon afterwards I decided we could afford a telephone and applied for one. It is almost incredible to me now that I had managed for so long without it, professionally as well as privately.
I also decided it was time to take driving lessons and get a car. In purchasing the car I made the same mistake as in buying the house, but with less justification. My career was going well, I was earning increasing income as a writer, and I could have afforded to get into debt without worrying, but Dad’s example or genetic input guided my choice once again. I should have bought a new Mini on what was then called ‘hire purchase’; instead I looked for a cheap second-hand car. I took what I believed was reliable advice from a neighbour, Michael, whose little boy was a playmate of our Julia. His father had been in the motor trade and Michael seemed to know a lot about cars himself, so I asked him to accompany me to inspect a Ford Popular several years old that was advertised in the Birmingham Mail for £100. We had a test drive in it, and Michael peered under the bonnet and pronounced it a bargain, so I bought it. It was in fact a clapped-out vehicle that was able to complete a gentle drive of a few miles around residential streets, but broke down when asked to do anything more strenuous. That summer we made a journey to visit friends in Cardiff, a distance of about 90 miles, which took us eleven hours, entailing calls at four different garages for repairs on the way, one of them requiring the removal of the entire engine to replace the clutch. In due course I had to replace the engine too. In fact it seemed to me that in the eighteen months I owned that car I replaced almost every moving part. It performed well by the end, but had cost me several times what it was worth.
The car blighted what was in other respects a time of interesting new developments and new contacts. I made the acquaintance of Brian Wicker, an English Literature tutor in the Birmingham extramural department who was a Catholic convert of left-wing political views, especially on the issue of nuclear weapons, and through him I got to know Ian Gregor, who had got the job at King’s College London for which I was interviewed in 1959. He had since moved to the University of Edinburgh, and sometimes visited the Wicker family. They both belonged to a network of Catholics in university English departments, extensive enough to support a conference which met annually at the Dominican Priory and retreat house at Spode, in Staffordshire, to discuss connections between religion and literature. I attended the conference in 1963, as did Ian and Bernard Bergonzi, and fairly regularly for some years after. The bar opened punctually at lunchtime and in the evening, manned by a friar in the white Dominican habit, a novel experience. Participants included some interesting postgraduates and research fellows from Cambridge, known as the Slant group after the magazine they edited, which articulated a Marxist interpretation of authentic Christian faith, identifying the Kingdom of Heaven with Revolution on earth. Its leading lights were Terry Eagleton and Adrian Cunningham, though I missed the former’s attendance at Spode, and met him much later elsewhere.
The English Department was engaged in the long-postponed but inevitable process of revising its syllabus. No issue is more important to the academic staff of any department, or more contentious, since the syllabus defines the subject to which they have dedicated their professional lives, and the status of each one’s special field within it. Twentieth-century English literature and American literature had recently been added to the curriculum, and Malcolm and I, supported by Richard, thought there should also be more teaching on critical theory and methodology. It was not practicable to squeeze all this new subject matter into the existing degree structure. After many exhausting departmental meetings it was decided that there would be a new first-year syllabus introducing all students to the whole range of English studies, and then in the two years leading to their finals they would elect to join one of three groups, A, B and C, who would pursue some ‘core’ courses in common but choose options in medieval, Renaissance and modern literature respectively. As might have been predicted, the largest group of students opted for C group, which caused some concern to teachers belonging to the other groups, including Spencer, who was the figurehead of B group, though he preferred to use the faintly derisory term ‘platoon’, as if to distance himself from the exercise. He had had a good war, serving on the General Staff in Egypt and rising to the rank of lieutenant colonel, sailing on the Nile in off-duty hours with Brigadier Enoch Powell.
The students were a bright and interesting set of young people – and so they should have been, because the competition for admission was intense. We had about 400 applications for 40 places in the Single Honours course and interviewed all who seemed eligible, making them first write a commentary on a short literary text for an hour, so that both oral and written evidence of their potential could be assessed. It was a time-consuming exercise but worthwhile, for we would have to teach them for three years. Most of the successful candidates were the first members of their families to go to university, like the majority of us teachers, and it was fascinating to see how quickly they changed and developed intellectually and in other ways in the new environment.
A student I had tutored in my first year in the Department who had particularly impressed me was Jim Duckett, a lad from Coventry, to whose essays I frequently gave marks in the ‘A’ range. He also revealed talents as a writer and performer in occasional student entertainments, the exercise of which probably prevented him from getting a First. But he did get a good enough 2.1 to begin postgraduate research. In the summer term of 1963, he wrote, produced and performed in a revue consisting of satirical sketches and songs, which he put on in the Faculty of Arts. Malcolm and I watched some rehearsals, and Malcolm was sufficiently impressed to invite John Harrison, the recently appointed Artistic Director of the Birmingham Rep, to come and see the show, which he enjoyed as much as we did. It was funny and intelligent and slickly presented. Malcolm had got to know John years before in Nottingham when he was in charge of the Playhouse there, and John had suggested Malcolm should now try writing a play for the Rep. Instead, Malcolm proposed that he, Jim Duckett and I should write a revue together, and to my astonishment John commissioned it. At this time satirical revue was very much in vogue, helped by the huge success of Beyond the Fringe on stage and That Was the Week That Was on television, but John was taking a considerable risk, since none of us had any professional experience of writing for the theatre.
Revue is an essentially collaborative genre and Malcolm was an enthusiastic collaborator throughout his life. He claimed that he and a young American friend at Indiana University used to write short stories together sitting on opposite sides of a table, typing energetically until one of them said ‘Blocked!’ upon which they would change places and continue the other’s work – an anecdote which itself has the makings of a revue sketch. He, Jim and I quickly began to write sketches and song lyrics to show John, and he was sufficiently satisfied to schedule our show for a four-week run at the Rep in November, while demanding more material to choose from. It was a genuinely collaborative process: each of us would write drafts of sketches and songs at home and bring them to joint sessions in Malcolm’s office in the University, where we tried them out and rejected or reworked them, Malcolm typing the revised scripts as Jim and I prowled around him. There was much hilarity at these sessions, and I’m not sure that writing was ever such unadulterated fun for me again. From writing humorous pieces for Punch and The Tablet I had acquired the habit of spotting aspects of contemporary life ripe for parody or satire, and I did not find it difficult to develop these ideas in the form of drama, and even song lyrics. I had a record I played to Julia and Stephen of traditional songs sung by young children, including ‘The Derby Ram’ with the refrain ‘It’s a lie, it’s a lie, it’s a lie, lie, lie’, and we composed verses in which spokesmen for the various political parties made statements which received that rejoinder, ending with a topical reference to the Profumo Affair. We had a Brechtian pantomime, and an ‘All Purpose Sentimental Song’ and a ‘Sunday Newspaper Service’ (‘“Thrice was I beaten, twice was I thrown out of pubs, and once I was sent to prison. All because I would not reveal my sources.” Words, my dear readers, taken from Acts of the Reporters, page 5, column 3’). We had a Festival of Folk Song and Dance which began with Bavarians in lederhosen singing demonstratively: ‘With a yodel yodel elly, yodel elly, yodel elly elly Eye Ay! Oh, we slap our bottoms ’cause we like it and it’s warm on a cold day!’ and ended with a troupe of Morris dancers singing: ‘They say that life is just a dream, With a heigh-ho, heigh-ho nitty ditty day-do, soho, yoyo, derry down dum.’ It was silly but hilarious, and John shrewdly chose it to end the first half of the show. The curtain rose after the interval on the exhausted dancers still staggering round in a circle, grinding out their song.
The Old Rep, as it is now known, situated close to New Street station in the city centre, is a theatre with a long and distinguished history, founded in 1913 by Sir Barry Jackson who was its artistic director for most of his life. Many of the most famous actors on the British stage performed there – Laurence Olivier, Edith Evans and Ralph Richardson before the war, for instance, and Albert Finney, Ian Richardson and Derek Jacobi after it. John Harrison, speaking at an event to celebrate the Rep’s centenary in 2013, explained that they loved playing there because their voices could reach every person in the audience without strain. He knew, having worked there himself as an actor in the 1940s. He called it a Stradivarius among theatres. It has about 400 seats in a steep rectangular rake, not much wider than the proscenium, a deeply unfashionable shape today, but one which ensures that every member of the audience can see and hear perfectly. In 1963 there were plans afoot to build a much bigger theatre deemed more appropriate to England’s Second City, and in consequence the fabric and amenities of the old Rep had been neglected. It has since been handsomely renovated and one can appreciate what a gem it is; but shabby though it was then, we couldn’t have had a better venue for our first attempt at writing for the professional stage.
There were no stars in the company of seven that performed Between These Four Walls, as our revue was called, though Linda Gardner, John Harrison’s wife, was an enchanting and versatile actress, and Ralph Nossek would have a long and successful career as a character actor. There was, however, a star just about to be born: twenty-three-year-old Julie Christie. Her aspirations were focused on film but she had joined the Rep for a season to get acting experience, at £16 a week. While our show was in rehearsal she was given leave to attend the Venice Film Festival, where the film of Billy Liar, in which she was one of Tom Courtney’s three girlfriends, was premiered. It won instant acclaim and Julie’s performance was especially praised, launching her on a brilliant career in movies. She showed no sign of having her head turned by this success during the production of Between These Four Walls, which was just as well because she really wasn’t very good as a stage actress, though she tried hard and humbly accepted advice – even from Jim Duckett. I have a memory of the postgraduate student coaching the future film star in the delivery of a song during a break in rehearsals, Julie nodding gratefully.
Between These Four Walls opened on the 19th of November. J.C. Trewin reviewed it next day in the Birmingham Post kindly and at length, under the headline, ‘The University Wits of Station Street’, praising its ‘sustained good temper, gaiety and zest’. Other reviews in the local press were generally favourable, and box office bookings were encouraging, but soon our luck ran out. At first I went every night to the show, fascinated by the experience of hearing my own lines spoken and observing whether they worked or not for the audience, something a novelist can never do. There was a sketch in the first half about a job interview, and the candidate showed his insouciance by entering with a transistor radio playing pop music in his hand. One evening it was suddenly interrupted by a news flash that President Kennedy had been assassinated. The audience laughed uneasily at what seemed to be a joke in poor taste. In the interval they discovered that it had been a real broadcast and a genuine announcement, and the house was very subdued in the second half. Nobody felt like going to the theatre for some time after that event, certainly not to a light-hearted revue, and our audience figures slumped, recovering somewhat in the latter part of the run. A West End management manifested interest in transferring the show, but this too petered out. We had to be content with about £40 each in royalties, and a creative experience which was in fact priceless.
Meanwhile, I had been pursuing possible ways of spending a year in America, an aspiration of many young academics in those days. American universities were wealthy, numerous and expanding, and the best had staff (‘faculty’, in American usage) who were leaders in their fields, including literary criticism. American novelists like Salinger, Bellow, Mailer, Malamud and Updike seemed more ambitious and innovative than their British contemporaries. For a young English writer and critic America was ‘where it’s at’, to use one of the many phrases we borrowed from its colloquial speech to enliven our native idiom. My experience of American expatriate life in West Germany, my friendship with Park and Malcolm’s anecdotes of the two separate years he had spent there all strengthened my desire to see the country for myself.
There were two ways of doing this: to take a job as a visiting teacher at a university, or to get a grant or fellowship for study and research in the USA, taking unpaid leave of absence from Birmingham in either case. I was tempted by the first alternative because American salaries were more generous than the British equivalents and would enable me and my family to live comfortably, while still making a profit on the trip. Richard Hoggart had enjoyed a spell at Rochester University and elicited an attractive offer to me through his contacts there. But I had also applied for a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship, which funded one or two years’ study and travel in the USA for young professionals in various fields, and I reached the final stage of the highly competitive selection process. I had first heard about this fellowship from Tony Petti, who had been a Fellow in 1959–60, and strongly recommended it. It was a counterpart to the Rhodes Scholarships which brought so many bright young Americans to Oxford, cementing the ‘special relationship’ between the two countries, but the Harkness was much more comprehensive, flexible and imaginative in its operation. Fellows could attach themselves to an institution of their choice, but did not register for degree courses. They proposed their own programme of work – mine was to acquire, in situ, a basic knowledge of American literature, of which I knew very little prior to the twentieth century. The fellowship was not worth as much as a visiting teacher’s salary, but it covered the transatlantic fares of spouses and children. Fellows were required to travel for three months in America, visiting at least three different major regions of the country, and a hire car was provided for this purpose. All you had to do to earn this largesse was to write a long essay about your experience at the end of it. When I wrote to Park in March 1964 saying I was wondering whether to take the fellowship if it was offered rather than the better-paid job at Rochester, he replied bluntly, ‘I’d turn down as much as $10,000 for three courses there, if I could get $6000 (plus fares) for doing nothing.’ Of course he meant by the latter phrase the freedom to do whatever one wanted to do, and of course he was absolutely right. When I looked back later on what was probably the most liberating and productive twelve months of my life, I trembled at the thought that I had once hesitated about seizing the opportunity. It was my last chance to do so because I was just under the age limit for applicants.
I accepted the fellowship when it was offered in April, but not without qualms at the prospect of travelling to and around America with children aged four and two. To make things as easy as possible for the family I proposed to spend a semester at Brown University studying American literature, so that we would have the advantage of the Honans’ friendly presence there before setting off on our travels. The Brown English Department was strong in American literature, so the location made academic sense, and the Harkness people were very pleased with my choice because most Fellows wanted to be attached to more prestigious universities like Harvard, Yale and Berkeley, where they all had much the same experience. The Honans for their part were delighted at the prospect of having us as neighbours in Providence for five months. We had seen disappointingly little of each other during Park’s Guggenheim year in London, simply because we couldn’t accommodate each other’s families for overnight visits. He and Jeannette exerted themselves generously to take the stress out of our American adventure, finding us an apartment near the Brown campus at a very reasonable rent, and giving invaluable advice on what to pack, and what not to. (‘Only a madman would bring a dinner-suit or tuxedo to America,’ Park assured me in answer to a question of mine.) They even offered to drive to New York and meet us off the Queen Mary, on which we were to cross the Atlantic in August, but we did not put them to that trouble. I was glad that earlier in the year I had been able to do Park a small favour, when I declined an invitation by the Encyclopaedia Britannica to write a long article on Style with a recommendation that they try Park, who accepted it gratefully. His Guggenheim project had not really taken shape, but this gave him the stimulus to put all his notes and thoughts into a coherent but condensed form, and its appearance in this highly esteemed publication would look good on his CV.
In the months before our departure I strove to finish my own book on the language of fiction, then called ‘The Novelist’s Medium’, so that I would not have to take all my notes and drafts with me to the States, and could start my fellowship year with a clean sheet. I had by this time completed the first section, about a third of the book, which was theoretical, though illustrated with close analyses of a number of extracts from classic and modern fiction; and I had written most of the second part, which consisted of essays on individual novels with particular attention to their verbal texture.
The premise of the theoretical section was: ‘that if we are right to regard the art of poetry as an art of language, then so is the art of the novel; and that the critic of the novel has no special dispensation from that close and sensitive engagement with language we naturally expect from the critic of poetry’. It seemed to me that the neglect of this principle was especially evident in the work of F.R. Leavis and his disciples, who constituted the most influential school of literary criticism in Britain and the Commonwealth in the mid-twentieth century. Leavis’s book The Great Tradition (1948) asserted that the novelists who belonged to it were characterised by ‘a vital capacity for experience, a kind of reverent openness before life, and a marked moral intensity’ – ethical rather than aesthetic values, which he seemed to think could be demonstrated by plonking long quotations on the page, without any analytical effort to trace the effectiveness of these passages to the diction and syntax employed by the writers. He proclaimed an austerely restricted canon of indisputably great novelists consisting of Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad (later to be supplemented by D.H. Lawrence and later still by a revaluated Dickens), but even some of the chosen few failed to satisfy him at times. The Ambassadors, he complained, ‘produces an effect of “disproportionate doing” – of a technique the subtleties of which are not sufficiently controlled by a feeling for value and significance in living’. I defended James’s late style by a detailed analysis of his rendering of the superb climactic scene of The Ambassadors, when the hero belatedly realises he has been deceived by those he thought were his friends.
Other critics, notably the American Mark Schorer, had applied to prose fiction the close reading tools, honed on poetry and poetic drama, of the New Criticism, but they tended to favour modernist fiction, which was most amenable to this approach. I defended H.G. Wells, whose prose in Tono-Bungay had been criticised by Schorer to throw into relief the beauty and subtlety of Joyce’s in A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, by arguing that Wells had quite different aims and priorities in what was generically a ‘Condition of England’ novel. Its core strengths are its powerful descriptions of the social systems encoded in the physical fabric of London and in the cultivated, enclosed English countryside, and its registration of the accelerating rate of change that was overwhelming both in the early twentieth century. It seemed to me then, and I have not changed my opinion since, that a theory of the novel, or general poetics of prose fiction, ought to encompass the whole spectrum of modes and subgenres, and not just those favoured by an individual critic or school of criticism.
Where I was mistaken at that point in time was in thinking this could be achieved by attention to verbal style alone. As I wrote in the afterword to a new edition of the book published in 1984:
I accept that narrative is itself a language, a code of signification (or bundle of codes, like a multi-core cable) that functions independently of specific verbal formulations. Some of the meanings attributable to a narrative will remain constant when it is translated from one language to another and from one medium to another; and some of the crucial decisions and choices by which a narrative is produced are in a sense prior to, or performed at a deeper level than, the articulation of the surface structure of the text, and may be analysed without reference to it.
I might have formulated these axioms earlier by introspection, reflecting on my own practice as a novelist, but instead I derived them from the Continental European tradition of structuralist criticism, which began with the Russian Formalists of the 1920s, was developed in France in the 1970s and ’80s, and had an increasing influence on Anglo-American literary criticism from that time onwards. Fortunately my ignorance of this work at the time of writing did not fundamentally affect the validity of the commentaries on individual texts in my book, or the interest of the theoretical questions it raised. In spite of the flaws in its argument, Language of Fiction is still in print.
The Catholic Church had been going through a period of very interesting change since Mary and I married. In 1958 Pope Pius XII, whose pontificate began in 1939, died, and John XXIII was elected in his place. The new pope, smiling and portly, was a very different character from his austere and tight-lipped predecessor. Since John was seventy-six he was at first labelled a ‘caretaker pope’, but he soon disproved this assumption by calling for a Second Vatican Council – a gathering of cardinals, bishops and theologians from all over the world – to review the Church’s teaching, liturgy and mission in the modern world; this opened in Rome in October 1962. The First Vatican Council (1868–70), convoked by Pius IX, had declared the Infallibility of the Pope, under strictly defined conditions, to be an Article of Faith, and inaugurated a period of authoritarian top-down government of the worldwide Church by the Vatican. John XXIII declared that it was time to open the windows and let in some fresh air, and although his pontificate was short, and he died in 1963 while the Council was still in progress, he initiated an upheaval in Catholic life comparable to, and as important as, the political and cultural revolutions of the 1960s – with which indeed it was often intertwined.
Not all Catholics, whether clerical or lay, were pleased with this development, which has divided the faithful ever since, but as young, progressive Catholics Mary and I welcomed the new order and most of the innovations it produced. We approved of mass celebrated in the vernacular language of each country instead of Latin, and the more meaningful participation of the laity in the liturgy this made possible; we welcomed the relaxation of rules about fasting and abstinence, and the option (for a few years, until the Vatican managed to withdraw it) of substituting a collective liturgy of reconciliation for private confession. We were delighted with the new spirit of ecumenism, the respect for other Christian denominations and other faiths that the Council’s deliberations encouraged, and the removal of invidious expressions like ‘the perfidious Jews’ from the Easter liturgy. But the crucial moral issue on which married Catholics hoped for change was birth control. There was an expectation, encouraged by some bold moral theologians, that the Council would consider whether the traditional natural law arguments against contraception still commanded assent. In fact neither Pope John XXIII nor his successor, Pope Paul VI, who reconvened the Council after John’s death, had any intention of letting the Council debate this sensitive topic, and instead Paul set up a commission of suitably qualified clergy and laity to advise him on the matter. As is well known, he declined to accept its overwhelming majority opinion in favour of change and reiterated the traditional teaching in his encyclical, Humanae Vitae, in 1969. But in the early summer of 1964, as we prepared to leave for America, there seemed reason to hope that a more liberal statement might emerge from the deliberations of the Council.
I finished typing the manuscript of ‘The Novelist’s Medium’, and sent it off to Colin Franklin, a senior editor at Routledge & Kegan Paul, who had discovered what I was working on and expressed keen interest in it. I had intended to take to America the preparatory notes and first draft pages of the novel inspired by my German holiday in 1951, and to go on with it there; but instead I was seized with the idea of a novel about the moral dilemma of married Catholics over birth control. As far as I was aware, the subject had never been treated in any detail in a novel, and I knew all about it, in theory and practice. From the beginning I thought of it as a comic novel. Although the Church’s teaching has undoubtedly had tragic consequences for countless lives, in sexual deprivation, marital stress and damage to women’s health, I thought that a serious treatment of such experience would be unlikely to engage non-Catholic readers, who would grow impatient with characters subjecting themselves to such unnecessary misery on what would seem irrational grounds; nor would I much enjoy writing about them. The subject had to be presented as a manifestation of the eternal comedy of human sexuality, the gap between the fantasy of unalloyed erotic bliss which we desire and the reality of married love, which is always vulnerable to unerotic contingency. But I doubt whether I would have reached this conclusion so promptly, or acted on it with such gusto, if I hadn’t been stimulated by Malcolm to develop the strain of humour in my writing, and had the experience of writing comedy for performance in our revue. I felt eager to start. The weather was fine one bank holiday weekend. There was a shed in our garden at Reservoir Road with a kind of porch under which I set up a table and chair, and began to write the first chapter.
I invented a character called Adam Appleby, a Catholic postgraduate student at London University who has three unplanned young children, and wakes up one morning troubled by the awareness that another may be on the way because his wife Barbara’s period is three days overdue. He mentally composes a short article on ‘Catholicism, Roman’ for a future Martian encyclopaedia.
As far as the Western Hemisphere is concerned, it appears to have been characterised by a complex system of sexual taboos and rituals. Intercourse between married partners was restricted to certain limited periods determined by the calendar and the body temperature of the female. Martian archaeologists have learned to identify the domiciles of Roman Catholics by the presence of large numbers of complicated graphs, small booklets full of figures and quantities of broken thermometers . . . Some scholars have argued that it was merely a method of limiting offspring . . . but as Roman Catholics produced more children on average than any other section of the community, this seems untenable.
Imitating the style of encyclopaedia articles gave me the idea for another thread in the novel – which I thought it needed, because Catholic hang-ups about birth control couldn’t sustain it alone. Adam is working daily in the round Reading Room of the British Museum on a stylistic thesis about modern fiction and, stressed by anxiety over Barbara’s possible fourth pregnancy, he has episodes of delirium in which commonplace events are present to his consciousness in parody or pastiche of the novelists he is studying. I thought I would call my novel ‘The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm’, a line from a George and Ira Gershwin song definitively recorded by Ella Fitzgerald:
A foggy day, in London town
Had me low, had me down.
I viewed the morning with alarm,
The British Museum had lost its charm.
And that in turn determined the time span of the novel’s action: it would be a single day, a foggy day in London. I packed the draft of the first chapter and notes for its continuation in my luggage, labelled for the Queen Mary, cabin class.