WE HAD LET our house for a very modest rent to my colleague Michael Green and Tim Moore, a young lecturer in the Philosophy Department, confident that they would look after it well, as they did. By arrangement, Michael was at the house to welcome us back and hand over the keys. He insisted on taking me that very day for a spin in his Hillman Imp to see the new roadworks that had just been completed in Birmingham: twin tunnels under the city leading to a multi-lane freeway (as Americans would call it) which joined the M6 motorway at an intersection already dubbed ‘Spaghetti Junction’ because of the complexity of its curves and connections; this enabled drivers to travel from just outside the city centre to the M6 without encountering a single traffic light. It was an impressive feat of civil engineering, but part of a development plan which throttled the central area with the concrete collar of a ring road, forcing pedestrians down into dismal and soon squalid underpasses. The plan also encouraged the indiscriminate destruction of older property and the erection of a great many cheap and nasty commercial buildings which weathered badly. This New Brutalist makeover of the city centre came under increasing criticism, and has since been undone and replaced by more user-friendly and architecturally eclectic developments; but my first reaction to Michael’s exhilarating guided tour was that it had transformed Birmingham into something like an American city, and blown away the dull grey provincial ambience which had permeated it like a fog when we first came there, and hung around until now.
Michael, who was always the first member of the Department to latch on to new cultural and intellectual trends, had got hold of an American edition of Kate Millett’s Sexual Politics, shortly to be published in Britain, and asked if we had read it. We hadn’t even heard of it. It seemed that Birmingham was somewhat ahead of Berkeley in this respect. The first manifestation of what was then called Women’s Liberation and is now termed second-wave feminism (the first wave being that of the New Woman and the suffragettes earlier in the century) was a demonstration against the Miss America Pageant in Atlantic City in the fall of 1968, but it was a very inconspicuous element in the Californian counterculture of 1969, which was steeped in unacknowledged male chauvinism, to use a term put into currency by Kate Millett. One of the counterculture’s venerated heroes was Henry Miller, and another was D.H. Lawrence, Tropic of Cancer and Lady Chatterley’s Lover being regarded as prophetic books heralding the age of sexual liberation. Millett pilloried both authors as reactionaries for their patriarchal and phallocentric treatment of relationships between the sexes, an indictment that became entirely plausible once traditional assumptions about gender were questioned. It would be hard to exaggerate the effect of this book and of Germaine Greer’s broader polemic, The Female Eunuch, published in 1970, on literary and cultural studies. One consequence was the steep decline in status of D.H. Lawrence in Eng.Lit. syllabuses, and therefore of the influence of Leavis and his followers who had invested heavily in his reputation. Another was the emergence of a distinctively feminist criticism, which set out to revise the literary canon by reinterpreting and rediscovering women writers of the past. For some time the proportion of women studying English at university had been steadily increasing and they were now in the majority. Feminist criticism gave their studies a new motivation and a new excitement. As a formalist myself I was wary of critics who, as Northrop Frye put it (I paraphrase from memory), judged literature according to criteria derived from something that interested them more. But as a social phenomenon I welcomed the movement, not least because the women it touched seemed to become much more interesting in consequence.
In Birmingham a lively Women’s Lib group had already formed, composed mainly but not exclusively of women associated in some way with higher education, including wives of academics, such as Mary, who had subordinated their careers to those of their husbands. She joined it soon after we got back, and it provided exactly the encouragement she needed to act on the counsel of her Californian psychiatrist, though she criticised some of the more extreme views expressed by the sisterhood, and their neglect of practical issues in pursuit of the ideal. She went off one weekend with Christopher to a big national gathering of women’s groups from all over the country, while I looked after Julia and Stephen at home. The conference was held in a holiday camp, out of season. The room set aside by the management as a crèche had no toilet facilities and Mary was obliged to lend desperate mothers with infants the special portable loo (a potty in the form of a small toilet) which she had trained Christopher to use. Holding this object by way of illustration, she made a short speech to the 500 delegates suggesting that the episode was a concrete example of women being treated as second-class citizens.
Soon we both became involved in the Catholic Renewal Movement, an association of laity agitating for radical reform in the Church which had something in common with Women’s Lib, for there was no institution so comprehensively patriarchal as the Roman Catholic Church. The CRM had a fairly short life under its original name, and mutated into a similar organisation called Catholics for a Changing Church. If you google ‘Catholic Renewal Movement’ all the results refer to the Charismatic Renewal which developed a little later in the Catholic Church and was akin to Protestant Pentecostalism. Our movement arose out of the controversy that followed the publication of Humanae Vitae. A number of bishops censured or suspended priests who voiced their dissent from the encyclical, and two groups of laity were formed to support them, one based in Surrey, and the other in Birmingham. These soon merged and established a national network of Catholics concerned not only with the birth control issue but also that the reforming impetus of Vatican II should be maintained and extended to all aspects of Catholic life – including the role of women. In due course Mary and a friend, Barbara McLoughlin, published a forceful article in the Catholic Herald (then a much more liberal paper than it is today) making a case for the ordination of women, and deploring the way in which the figure of the Virgin Mary in Catholic tradition had been used to legitimise the subordinate position of women in the life of the Church.
The initial stimulus that created the Birmingham group of the CRM, however, was to support Father John Challenor, a priest at the Birmingham Oratory founded by Newman, who was in dispute with his fellow Oratorians and the archdiocese over Humanae Vitae, and our first positive action was to tackle that issue. We collected a good deal of anecdotal evidence in the form of letters, some of them heartbreaking, of the stress and suffering the traditional teaching had caused to individual couples, and resolved to prepare a leaflet addressed to troubled Catholics, setting out the grounds for conscientious dissent from HV, which would be made available in clinics of the Family Planning Association, who were keen to co-operate. I took on the task of writing it, and after a few emendations it was approved by the group, printed and distributed. It was about 1,000 words long, not counting a number of supporting quotations from respected sources, including the statement David Frost had skilfully wrung from Cardinal Heenan in a much-publicised TV interview, that ‘Nothing in this Encyclical interferes with the primacy of conscience – that a person’s ultimate decision depends on himself’. (It would have been unrealistic to regret that he did not add ‘or herself’.) The FPA distributed nearly 100,000 copies of the leaflet before the Catholic hierarchy put pressure on them to desist. I doubt if anything I wrote before or after it did as much good. After the censorship of our leaflet we requested a meeting with the Archbishop of Birmingham, George Dwyer, a cousin of the novelist Anthony Burgess, though he did not boast of the connection. He listened to us courteously, and recognised our good intentions, saying, ‘I will not quench the smoking flax’ – alluding to a passage in Isaiah about the servant of God, rendered in the modern Jerusalem Bible as: ‘He does not break the crushed reed, nor quench the wavering flame.’ But the archbishop could not of course agree with the argument of the leaflet. When one of our number told him of the evidence we had collected of marital stress caused by the ban on efficient contraception, he replied that our faith sometimes required heroic sacrifice from us. A note in the summary John Challenor made of the meeting mentions that I interjected, ‘But in this case, is it worth it?’
What preoccupied me professionally following our spell in California was the progress of Out of the Shelter to publication, which turned out to be inordinately slow. Cutting the original typescript by a quarter was much more time-consuming than it would be today on a computer, but I finished the task not long after returning home. Kevin Crossley-Holland had moved on from Macmillan, and I was assigned an editor called James Wright. I had a couple of meetings with him and a young female colleague, as a result of which I made some further ‘fine-combing’ cuts to the text, for they were still concerned about its length. While this was in hand James wrote to me to say that Macmillan had begun to use computerised typesetting, then a brand-new technology, ‘with considerable success’, and they wanted to produce my book by this method. The advantage, he said, was that it was both cheaper and quicker than conventional typesetting. The only drawback was that I would not be able to correct proofs, because these would be in a form that only a computer expert could understand. ‘He will, of course, take the utmost care: his reputation depends upon it.’ Eager to please and to speed the process, I suppressed my misgivings and agreed. Publication was scheduled for early in June 1970. I cannot improve on a brief account of the sequel which I wrote in an introduction to the new edition of the novel published by Secker & Warburg in 1985:
In April the publication date was postponed till August. In May it was postponed again till 10 September. In August it was postponed again till 24 September. By this time I had seen an advance copy of the book and was appalled. The text was riddled with misprints . . . many of them grotesquely obvious (like u for you). A pun had been removed, and a joke transformed into a meaningless banality by the correction of a deliberate misspelling, in spite of the fact that I had written in the margin of my MS ‘Joke! Do not correct spelling.’ The lines of type were bumpy, the spaces between words grossly uneven, and there were strange gaps within words, notably between the o and the th of my central character’s name, Timothy, which occurred two or three hundred times. Those lonely words at the beginning of a line that printers call ‘widows’ abounded, as did awkward hyphenations at line endings. In short it was the most hideous piece of printing I had ever set eyes on, and there was absolutely nothing I could do about it.
James Wright was sympathetic and apologetic when I complained, but he concealed the true scale of the incompetence to which my novel had been subjected. Many years later I chanced to meet, at a dinner party given by a Birmingham colleague, a man who had worked in the production department of Macmillan at the time. He told me that the text that had so appalled me was actually a second attempt, and that the first printout was so garbled that they had to destroy the tape and start all over again, which explained the repeated delays and postponements.
The only good thing to be said for the finished book was that it had a striking cover, featuring a naked female, half-Rhinemaiden, half-floozie, wearing a Nazi armband and the Stars and Stripes as a cape, flying through the air above the figure of Timothy and a montage of the story’s chief locations. The novel was eventually published on 1st October and it soon became obvious that it was a flop. There were very few reviews, and only two really good ones, one of them written anonymously by my friend Bernard Bergonzi for the TLS, which was sincerely felt but not disinterested. The horrible printing cannot be blamed for this disappointing response, though it obviously didn’t help; neither did the book’s delayed appearance at the very peak of the autumn publishing season, when several novels by well-known authors were dominating the literary pages. The main reason, I believe, was that it was simply not a novel for the 1970s. Change and revolution, excess and experiment were in the air, and there was not much interest in a realistic, nostalgic evocation of growing up in wartime and post-war England. When Secker & Warburg proposed to reissue the novel I decided to revise the text once more, since it would have to be re-set anyway, restoring some of the cuts while making some new ones and other minor adjustments. In that form it was well received and has been in print ever since. But in 1970 I was deeply dejected by its failure. There was no prospect of a paperback edition or an American sale. Macmillan printed 3,000 copies of their edition but bound only 2,000, and when these were sold or otherwise disposed of they pulped the remaining sheets, as I discovered some time later. ‘God seems to have sent the publishing profession to save you from self-love,’ an Irish friend, Nuala O’Faolain (then a producer of videos for the Open University, later to achieve considerable fame as a writer), commented in a letter when I told her of the novel’s final fate. Ironically, it became in consequence a rare book and the most valuable of my first editions, copies with the jacket in good condition being currently offered by dealers at prices over £1,000.
The poor reception of a novel in which I had invested so much time and effort plunged me into a depression, from which I recovered in an unexpected and rewarding way: by giving up smoking. This had been a contentious issue in the family for some time, for it was by now incontrovertibly established that smoking caused lung cancer. In California Julia and Stephen had been disturbed by short public service films on television in which smokers in the last stages of this disease earnestly enjoined others to quit, followed by a caption giving the date on which they had died. The children pestered me to give up the habit, and Mary, who had never smoked, took the same view, refusing any longer to buy for me the latakia-laced pipe tobacco I favoured (Three Nuns Empire Blend) when she went shopping. I had switched to the pipe because it was supposed to be healthier than cigarettes since one did not inhale, but I only had to look at the disgusting goo that collected in the bowl, or the smoke-stained ceiling of my study, to see that it could not be good for me. I wanted to give up, but I doubted whether I could do without something that had become an indispensable aid to reflection and concentration in the writing process, and an essential prop for small-group teaching (what else could so simply cover a moment’s pause for thought as the act of lighting or relighting a pipe?). In fact I seldom had a pipe out of my mouth for long, apart from at mealtimes and in the hours of sleep. In the late autumn of that year I succumbed to a bad bout of flu, and for ten days or so I really had no desire to smoke. It occurred to me that this was an opportunity to try and overcome the addiction, and I made it a project in my convalescent state. Several days went by without my succumbing to the lure of the pipe, though there was a half-full tin of tobacco in my desk drawer. I recovered from the flu, and began to count in weeks instead of days, distracting myself from temptation by looking forward to meals and drinks, which acquired a forgotten intensity of flavour as my palette recovered its sensitivity. I realised that this was a life-enhancing, life-extending project I could actually accomplish, and by Christmas I was certain I had done it. I never smoked again.
That achievement did much to restore my self-esteem, but the best way to recover from the failure of a novel is of course to start a new one that won’t be vulnerable to the same criticisms. I knew it would need to have some of the comic invention and stylistic exuberance that had made The British Museum is Falling Down my most popular work of fiction to date, and I had brought back a rich haul of material from my six months at Berkeley, but for some time I was uncertain how to use it. Given the number of novels about British academics on American campuses published in recent years, including Malcolm’s Stepping Westward, it was essential to find some new variation on this theme. Mulling over the problem, it occurred to me that no one had written a novel about a visiting American teacher at a British university – a less common phenomenon, usually part of an exchange scheme between two institutions. That thought immediately presented the solution to my problem: a novel about two academics, one British, one American, exchanging jobs for six months, a narrative that would cut back and forth between the locations, based loosely on Birmingham and Berkeley – call them ‘Rummidge’ in the English Midlands, and ‘Plotinus’ on the Bay of Esseph in the State of Euphoria – with opportunities for comic-satiric observation of the contrasting environments and manners of each university. Dramatise these differences by setting the story at a time when both institutions are rocked by a wave of student protest. Make the two main characters epitomise the competitive professionalism and humane amateurism of the two academic cultures: the Brit someone whose finest hour had been his brilliant First in Finals and whose failure to publish has retarded his subsequent career, the American a prolific author of theory-driven critical interpretations of the novels of Jane Austen designed to silence all rival scholars in the field. Call them Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp. Let these two professors (the humble British lecturer would acquire the title of ‘Associate Professor’ in America) change as a result of exposure to the opposite of what they were used to. Make them both forty years of age, a time when a man takes stock of his life and may be tempted to change direction; one of them in a marriage that is going stale and the other in a marriage on the brink of breaking up. Could they in the course of the story exchange wives as well as jobs? Why not? Comedy licenses such symmetries and coincidences. I imagined them passing each other in the air on their way to change places, and began to write the opening paragraph. ‘High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, two professors of English Literature approached each other at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour . . .’ A comic novel whose plot entailed double adultery between the four main characters meant of course that they could not be Catholics, burdened with theological guilt, and that was a kind of liberation for me. I thought I would enjoy writing this novel, and I did.
The character of Philip Swallow contains some traits of mine, as that of Morris Zapp owes something to my acquaintance with Stanley Fish, but they are essentially representative types. Zapp has been identified by academic readers with several other American professors, some of whom I never met, and Philip differs in several respects from me, not least in his professional barrenness in the matter of publications. One year in this period I noticed that there were more entries under my name in the University’s annual Research Report than those mustered by the entire French Department. I was still pursuing a twin-track career, as novelist and academic critic, equally committed to both activities and making connections between them. In 1971 I published a collection of essays written over the previous few years entitled The Novelist at the Crossroads, including ‘Choice and Chance in Literary Composition: a self-analysis’, in which I anatomised the development of a short story of my own from inception to published text. I gambled that readers would find the exercise interesting rather than narcissistic, and wrote several similar pieces in later years.
The title essay of the 1971 collection was indebted to The Nature of Narrative by the American critics Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg, and engaged with Scholes’s more recent and more polemical book The Fabulators. He argued that the synthesis of realism and romance from which the classic European novel evolved was now irreparably shattered, and in consequence literary novelists were turning increasingly to various combinations of fantasy, allegory and myth, which he called ‘fabulation’. It seemed to me, however, that there was no single mode of writing which was dominating the literary fiction of our time, as did the panoramic social novel in the nineteenth century or the modernist novel of subjective consciousness earlier in the twentieth century; instead there was a wide range of contrasting and coexisting practices from which the writer could choose as he or she stood at a metaphorical crossroads. Ahead lay the path of realism which was still followed by many respected novelists and their faithful readers, but which was increasingly disparaged by avant-garde critics and writers because, as one of them said, ‘reality isn’t realistic any more’. Doubts about the validity of traditional realism might encourage a writer to take one of the two alternative paths that led away from it in opposite directions: fabulation, exemplified by novels like John Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy and Günter Grass’s The Tin Drum, or the fact-based non-fiction novel, like Truman Capote’s In Cold Blood and Norman Mailer’s third-person memoir, Armies of the Night. Alternatively, I argued, the novelist hesitating over which direction to follow might build that hesitation into the novel itself, which then became what I called the ‘problematic novel’ (because I had not yet picked up the newly coined and more appropriate term ‘metafiction’) – the novel partly about its own processes, for example John Fowles’s The French Lieutenant’s Woman or Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook. This kind of reflexivity in works of fiction was not totally new, of course – you find it as far back as Don Quixote and Tristram Shandy – but it acquired a new importance in the late twentieth century when, as Elizabeth Hardwick wrote in the New York Review of Books while I was writing my essay, ‘many novels show a degree of panic about the form. Where to start and where to end, how much must be believed and how much a joke, a puzzle . . . the mood of the writer is to admit manipulation and design, to exploit the very act of authorship in the midst of the imagined scene.’
When asked how I would characterise my own work in this scheme I usually answered: ‘basically realistic but with elements of metafiction’. Of late I have been drawn to fact-based narrative in two biographical novels about writers, Henry James and H.G. Wells, but I never wrote another novel like Out of the Shelter, which seeks to give its fictional story an unbroken illusion of reality by adopting a single point of view and a uniform style. Changing Places contains a lot of realistic detail based on personal experience and observation, but each chapter is written in a different mode: intrusive authorial narration; narration focalised through the consciousness of the two main characters, at first in synchronised alternation and later in two sequential blocks; narration in the form of letters between the main characters and their wives; narrative inferable from extracts from newspapers, flyers, official bulletins, etc. read by the characters; and finally narrative in the form of a film script. I did this partly to offset the symmetry of the plot, which might otherwise have seemed somewhat mechanical and predictable. But, like the passages of parody and pastiche in The British Museum is Falling Down, these shifts in narrative method also have the metafictional effect of foregrounding the artificiality of all narration, the irreducible gap between the world and the book which the realistic novel seeks to disguise by its stylistic decorum. I am often asked how I manage to combine writing novels with the practice of analytical literary criticism, implying that the latter must inhibit creativity. On the contrary, I have found that it makes me more aware of the expressive potential of various techniques and helps me to solve problems I encounter in composition, while being a novelist undoubtedly helps me as a critic to analyse other novels by other writers. The compatibility of the very different professional personae of the novelist and the academic was another question, more difficult to answer.
The English Department was in a volatile state at this period. In 1970 Richard Hoggart obtained three years’ leave of absence to take up the post of Assistant Director General at UNESCO’s headquarters in Paris. It was an opportunity to participate in the formation of cultural policy on a global scale which he couldn’t resist, and also a welcome respite from his increasingly difficult relationship with Terence Spencer, whose habit of blocking or postponing by devious means any decision on departmental matters which he saw as threatening his own status caused Richard intense frustration. Simon Hoggart, chatting to me at a literary party more than forty years later, still remembered how his father would come home from the University beside himself with anger after some fruitless argument with Spencer. Disturbed by the new assertiveness of students since the events of 1968, and evidently feeling that the Department he had built up was developing in ways he could no longer control, Spencer began to adopt an attitude of prophetic despair. A ‘teach-in’ was arranged in the spring term of 1969, when I was away in Berkeley, at which a panel of the four professors – Terence, Richard, John Sinclair and Geoffrey Shepherd – were to confront the Department’s entire student body, and, evidently alarmed by this prospect, Spencer summoned an evening meeting of senior staff at Westmere, of which Park sent me a vivid account:
Scene: Terence’s hushed, book-lined office, wine bottles out, nine or ten staffers staring hard at the floor, Terence – with folded hands – gazing benevolently at the ceiling: ‘And so, in short, I am a total failure . . . all of the plans, all of the work over the past ten years has now been shown to be misguided. Utterly futile. It is clear that the Department is no longer respected by anyone at the University – by the students, by the Administration – the only hope now being, perhaps, for us to break into smaller groups and . . . simply survive . . . [one had the impression that the Nazis had just landed, and we were all to take to the hills] All that I have done has been to make things a little less catastrophic . . . For example, I felt it was important to have a novelist on the staff. David has been successful . . . He has been protected, and we must continue to protect him . . . So a few things, almost by accident, we have done well . . . But I want to tell you all that your arrangements, the way you run this Department, are absolutely wrong . . .’
Apparently it emerged from the subsequent discussion that Spencer wanted seminars abolished, tutorials limited to two students and, bizarrely, a compulsory course for all undergraduates on literature since 1950, though he must have been well aware that these suggestions would never win wide support from his colleagues. Whether he was aware when he appointed me that I was about to publish a novel I doubted, but I was touched that he considered me deserving of protection. He had given me a vital start in my academic career, and I would always be grateful to him for that. But like everyone else I found it increasingly difficult to have a normal conversation with him.
In the early seventies Terence absented himself from Department meetings and left us to conduct them as a kind of collective. There was general agreement that the syllabus was unsatisfactory, and that we were all teaching too many hours on a diversity of subjects in the effort to make it work, but no consensus on what should be done, and Richard’s absence compounded the lack of direction. It was partly for this reason that in 1972 I applied for chairs at two other universities, one by invitation and the other on my own initiative. The first was at Edinburgh. I was flattered by the interest of this large and prestigious Department, since I had only recently been promoted to senior lecturer at Birmingham. Never having been to Edinburgh, or indeed Scotland, I was doubtful whether I would want to move myself and family so far north, but thought I had nothing to lose by finding out what its attractions might be. The interviewing panel was formidably large. It included Frank Kermode, the external assessor, who gave me a genial smile when I sat down, but questioned me shrewdly when I professed an interest in Continental structuralist criticism, exposing some gaps in my knowledge. I forfeited the approval of Alastair Fowler, the Regius Professor of English Literature at Edinburgh, by refusing to agree that our job was to teach students to read literature correctly, since I did not accept that interpretation was ever final, and I left the interviewing room under no illusions that I would be offered the job, but not disappointed. I had taken a walk round Edinburgh that morning and decided that, beautiful and impressive as it was, it felt almost like a foreign city, a place where I would never feel at home. The other candidate whom I met on that occasion was Norman Sherry, then at the new University of Lancaster, soon to become the authorised biographer of Graham Greene, and he was of the same mind. After some time had elapsed I was informed that a considerably older man than either of us had been appointed: Wallace Robson, for most of his career an Oxford don, and currently a professor at the University of Sussex. This created a vacancy for a professorial appointment in Modern Literature at Sussex, which was duly advertised, and I decided to apply for it.
In retrospect I cannot really understand why I thought moving there would be worth all the upheaval; but Sussex was the most fashionable of the new universities, having quickly built up a reputation for cutting-edge research and innovative courses, and was attracting many bright students who would previously have gone to Oxbridge. It was also in a location that appealed to me, near London and by the sea (from which Birmingham was as far as one could be in England). Mary was not keen, but would not stand in my way. I wrote in June to ask Richard to be one of my referees, and in his reply he spoke positively of Sussex, whose VC, Asa Briggs, was a friend, and thought I would fit in happily there. He also told me that the Director General of UNESCO had asked him to stay on after 1973 for another two years, when the DG’s own term of office would expire, and hinted that he was likely to agree, even though he would have to resign his chair at Birmingham, as he could not expect the University to extend his leave of absence. I was not surprised when his resignation was confirmed soon afterwards. The Hoggarts had kindly invited Mary and me to spend a week with them in Paris, and I had sensed how absorbing and exciting he found the job, for all the frustrations he encountered in UNESCO’s Byzantine bureaucracy and political infighting. In particular he and Mary valued the opportunities to fly all over the world visiting sites of cultural importance with expert guides. But whether he realised it or not, he was making a decisive career choice of administration over teaching and research. The Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies was attracting bright young graduate students from all over the country and had moved out of the English Department into spacious accommodation in the Muirhead Tower. (This was a new building next to the Arts Faculty with an intriguing type of lift called a paternoster, a continuously moving belt of open compartments which passengers had to step nimbly in and out of, and which I promptly incorporated in my novel-in-progress.) Under the direction of Stuart Hall the Centre had become a thriving hothouse of radical ‘isms’ – Marxism, feminism, structuralism and various combinations and revisionist versions of these conceptual systems. Richard probably intuited that he would never feel comfortable in this babble of theoretical discourses and that he should allow the institution he had founded to evolve without him.
His resignation, however, created a professorial vacancy at Birmingham for which I would be eligible, and I pondered whether to apply when it was advertised. It would be awkward to seek promotion over older colleagues who might apply; on the other hand, I wouldn’t relish having any of them promoted over me. I gathered that there was a plan afoot to have the four professors in the Department acting as chairmen in rotation while each remained head of their autonomous graduate programmes, but it was being stymied by Terence’s determination to hold on to his office and status in the English Department, as well as at Westmere. Whatever happened, it looked as if Richard’s replacement would have to battle with Spencer as he had, and I didn’t feel equal to that. In this context the chair at Sussex, not attached to any specific administrative responsibility, became more enticing. Julia and Stephen were strongly opposed, however, and Mary doubtful, so when the invitation to an interview during the school summer holidays came I took the family down to Brighton on the day so that they could get a sense of its attractions.
I left them sitting on the beach while I went off for my interview. The University is situated on undulating open country where the Sussex Downs slope towards the sea between Brighton and Lewes. I walked up through the campus, which had grown considerably since I attended a conference there in 1966. The development of the site had been overseen and partly designed by Sir Basil Spence, and the architecture, though elegant in a restrained modernist way, seemed to me almost eerily pristine and harmonised, as if it had all sprouted magically from the green turf at the same moment. Since it was the long vac, the campus was largely deserted – so probably was Birmingham’s that day, but it was embedded in a city whose hum was always faintly audible, whereas this one was exposed to the silent sky and the Downs. Although the day was sunny, the Sussex campus made a slightly chilly impression on me. So did the interview, when with some difficulty I found the appointed room in the largely empty building where it took place. I don’t recall who conducted it, but I think there were only three of them, and I didn’t see signs of any other candidates. In fact I can’t remember much at all about the occasion, but I left with a sense that they had been looking for reasons to eliminate me rather than to appoint me. When I got back to the family sitting on the pebbled beach Julia exclaimed, ‘Father!’ (She had adopted this old-fashioned and slightly ironic style of address as a way of putting me in my place.) ‘For heaven’s sake don’t make us live here, it’s horrible!’ Stephen echoed her protest. They hadn’t taken to brash, commercialised, slightly grubby Brighton and its holiday crowds, perhaps because their last two summer holidays had been spent in Connemara and the Swiss Alps. I assured them that I didn’t expect to be offered the job, and would decline it if I were. Mary was as pleased as the children, for she was due to begin a postgraduate diploma course in Counselling and Health Education the following year at Birmingham Polytechnic, and we went home a contentedly united family.
I didn’t hear until May 1973 that Sussex had appointed someone else to their chair, but by then I had long ceased to give it a thought. I had just been made Reader at Birmingham, a title given to staff for achievement in research and publications, which carried a negligible rise in salary but implied a degree of what Spencer had called ‘protection’ from humdrum duties. That position suited me very well, and I decided I would not apply for the vacant chair when it was advertised. (Eventually the University tired of the English Department’s internal wranglings, rejected the idea of a rotating chairman and in 1975 appointed James Boulton, an outside candidate from Nottingham University, as Professor of English Literature and Head of the School of English, which proved to be an excellent decision.) I had nearly finished my new novel, provisionally entitled ‘Exchange’, and had started work on an ambitious critical book which I referred to privately as ‘Son of Language of Fiction’, but would eventually publish in 1978 as The Modes of Modern Writing: Metaphor, Metonymy, and the Typology of Modern Literature. It drew on a good deal of reading in Continental European literary theory, especially the work of the great Russian linguist Roman Jakobson, but I will not attempt to summarise its content here.
I sent the novel to Graham Watson in June. Mary had read it, of course, as had Park and Malcolm, and Lenny Michaels had checked a draft for the idiomatic accuracy of the American speech when he visited us in December ’72, in the course of a sabbatical in Europe. They had all liked it, but I waited in some suspense to hear Graham’s verdict. In my first years at Birmingham it was possible to make and receive outside calls on one’s desk telephone via the switchboard (I remember receiving one from a man asking me to settle a bet by declaring whether or not I was the same person as Malcolm Bradbury) but later this facility was withdrawn, and you had to make them and take them in the departmental office. When I was summoned there one day to take a call from Graham Watson, who had just read ‘Exchange’ and was bubbling over with enthusiasm for it, I had to mute my reciprocal delight and conceal as far as possible the subject of discussion from the ears of the secretaries, especially as his main concern was that it might contain some libellous portraits of my colleagues. He was sure Macmillan would exercise their option on the novel, and very hopeful that it would find an American publisher. I wrote a follow-up letter to set his mind at rest on the libel issue, and said I would insist on Macmillan’s printing the book by conventional methods to avoid another ‘computerised catastrophe’, adding blithely, ‘presumably there would be no problem about getting it out in spring ’74.’
Towards the end of July Graham wrote to say that Macmillan had passed. ‘They like the novel enormously but have reservations about being able to sell it in view of their results with Out of the Shelter . . . I have not the slightest doubt that we shall find a publisher elsewhere and we have in the meantime sent it to John Guest at Allen Lane since he is an admirer of your books.’ I was not sorry to be free of Macmillan, but puzzled by Graham’s first choice of an alternative. This hardback imprint, named after the founder of Penguin Books, now belonged to the recently merged Longman Penguin Group, though that was not clear to me at the time. I did not associate it with literary fiction, but I trusted Graham’s judgement. After an interval John Guest invited Graham and me to tea at his bijou dwelling in Chelsea or thereabouts. He was a man of about sixty with a striking resemblance to Angus Wilson, in more ways than one. After a polite exploratory conversation Guest came to the point: although he liked the novel in many respects he would not publish it unless I agreed to rewrite the more stylistically deviant chapters – the letters, the extracts from printed sources, and the film script at the end – as straight narrative: in short, to turn it into a conventional novel. I declined emphatically even to consider doing so, giving my reasons, and the meeting quickly terminated. Graham understood my decision, but I had the impression that his faith in the book was a little shaken. I suggested that we should try Jonathan Cape, currently the trend-setting publisher of literary fiction, and he agreed.
Cape, however, rejected the novel, without giving any particular reason. I was by now feeling quite demoralised, and Graham did not cheer me up by suggesting that if we had another rejection it might be wise to put the novel in a drawer for a while. I wrote to Malcolm, lamenting my failure to find a publisher, and he suggested that I should try Secker & Warburg, who published his own novels. Since the recent retirement of Fredric Warburg, this firm had been headed by Tom Rosenthal who, he said, was a very dynamic and supportive publisher of new fiction. This was a typically generous suggestion. Malcolm was writing The History Man at this time, and not many novelists would invite another writer working on similar subject matter, even if he was a friend, to join their own publisher’s list. In fact Graham may have abstained from making the same suggestion for that very reason. When I told him it came from Malcolm he said it was an excellent idea and acted on it at once. Towards the end of the year I heard that Tom Rosenthal would publish the novel if I cut it by 15,000 words. I did not quibble, but accepted gratefully, and had a letter from Tom early in January 1974, after the contract had been signed, welcoming me to the Secker list. He described reading the novel on a train journey, ‘causing prodigious discomfort to my travelling companions who were very put out by the spectacle of a perfectly ordinarily dressed man with a briefcase giggling helplessly as he turned over the pages of your typescript’. When I finally met Tom I wondered a little about his idea of ordinary dress, for he favoured boldly striped shirts and bright red braces, but for various reasons it was a long time before I had that pleasure.
Meanwhile I worked on reducing the length of the text with an editor, John Blackwell, and it was a happy collaboration. I discovered that he was already a fan of my novels when ‘Exchange’ arrived at Secker’s, and recommended it warmly to Tom Rosenthal. There was no doubt that the novel was improved by being cut, but John often defended passages I proposed for deletion and in the end the text was reduced by about 12,000 words, perhaps fewer. He was an in-house desk editor of a kind that hardly exists any more – not the ‘creative’ type who likes to be involved in the composition of a book, but one who worked on a completed manuscript, tuning and refining it by patient questioning and tactful suggestion, removing wrinkles and blemishes, and ensuring that nothing would interfere with the communication of meaning between writer and reader. He was also an inspired blurb-writer, an indefatigable source of exquisitely polished and highly amusing letters of the kind that light up an author’s day, and an exceptionally nice man. It was always a pleasure to climb the stairs, in the tall narrow building in Soho that housed Secker & Warburg, to his eyrie on the top floor, crammed with books and manuscripts in a state of organised chaos, and scented with the smoke of Gauloises, to chat over a glass or two of white wine from the bottle he had cooling in a small fridge. He edited all my novels until he died in 1997 at the age of only sixty, greatly missed by his authors, a notable list that included Malcolm.
In Britain 1974 was a year marked by two miners’ strikes, an energy crisis and three-day working, which slowed down all forms of production and caused a logjam in publishing schedules. In August, while correcting the proofs of Changing Places: a tale of two campuses (as I had decided to call it), I wrote to Lenny Michaels who, now that Park was a colleague in Birmingham, was my chief transatlantic correspondent:
It seems that the novel won’t be out until January next year, more than four years after I started it. I thought then that I would take two forty-year-old heroes as a challenge, and try to write about early middle age before experiencing it; now I shall be exactly forty when the novel appears, my birthday being January 28th . . . I have dedicated it, by the way, to ‘Lenny and Priscilla, Stanley and Adrienne, and many other friends on the West Coast’, which I trust won’t actually lose me any friends.
As publication drew near, however, I began to fear that I might forfeit the friendship of my colleagues at Birmingham. I had taken the precaution of inserting a prefatory note emphasising the fictional nature of the narrative:
Although some of the locations and public events portrayed in this novel bear a certain resemblance to actual locations and events, the characters, considered either as individuals or as members of institutions, are entirely imaginary. Rummidge and Euphoria are places on the map of a comic world which resembles the one we are standing on without corresponding exactly to it, and which is peopled by figments of the imagination.
Such disclaimers are so common as to carry little weight, but I had taken care not to portray any recognisable person in my characters, with the exception of Stanley, who I was sure would love the fictional version of himself (as indeed he did, putting ‘Morris Zapp’ on his door at Duke University years later). My satire was directed at two contrasting academic cultures, not at individuals, and I did not fear any libel suits. Also it would be obvious to my colleagues that the fictional Rummidge English Department was much smaller and much less distinguished than the one they belonged to. But, it belatedly occurred to me, they might reflect that most readers of the novel would not know that, and, given the resemblances between Rummidge and Birmingham as cities, would suppose that the novel was an accurate reflection of reality. In which case my colleagues and friends might be very displeased.
That thought, coming on top of the anxiety that builds up in every author as the publication of a book approaches, was enough to throw me into a state of panic, and for several weeks I was in a state of extreme apprehension, which caused me many sleepless nights. I knew intuitively that there was one thing which could save me from shame and embarrassment when the novel appeared: it must be a literary success. Like all comic novels, Changing Places was an extended joke, and I was inviting my colleagues to relax and enjoy it. If it didn’t amuse them, and if it wasn’t seen to be amusing a lot of other people, it would seem tasteless and offensive. Everything therefore depended on the reviews, and as I had no pre-publication interviews with journalists, I had no idea how it would be received. As the fateful time drew nearer John Blackwell fed me with hopeful messages which I clutched at gratefully: ‘our sales reps are distinctly keen – and our production department are extremely enthusiastic: if there is a precedent for that, I have missed it’. In the week before publication day, finally fixed for Monday 10th February, he reported that there had been an unusual number of requests from newspapers, including The Observer and the Sunday Times, for photographic portraits of me, indicating that at least the novel wouldn’t be ignored.
There is a very good scene in Frederic Raphael’s TV drama serial The Glittering Prizes, broadcast by the BBC in the following year to great acclaim, in which the character who is a novelist is shown coming downstairs early one morning in dressing gown and slippers and sitting on the bottom steps for some time, staring fixedly at the front door of the house, until suddenly several newspapers are thrust through the letter flap and fall on to the doormat. The novelist quickly picks them up and sits down again on the stairs to read his reviews. I had decided some time ago that I didn’t want to experience this moment of truth at home, in my familiar domestic environment, then go off afterwards with the children to mass at our parish church and spend the rest of Sunday in the usual routine way. I wanted to be away somewhere pleasant, where I was not known and not under observation. I booked myself and Mary into a hotel in Bath recommended in the Good Hotel Guide for the night of Saturday 8th February. We left the children at home in somebody’s care, drove to Bath, had a pleasant stroll around the town, enjoyed a delicious dinner, and made the most of a warm, luxurious bedroom. I slept well for the first time in many days. When we woke, Mary went to the door to collect the two Sunday papers we had ordered the night before. ‘See if there are any reviews,’ I said, ‘and tell me what they’re like.’ She sat down, leafed through the pages, found a review in each and read them. I watched her from the bed: her expression gave nothing away. At last she finished reading and handed the newspapers to me, saying with a smile, ‘They’re very good.’ I scanned the reviews quickly, then read them again more slowly. They were both raves. Jill Neville in the Sunday Times said, ‘Not since Lucky Jim has such a funny book about academic life come my way.’ From that quote alone, I knew I had written a successful book, and anxiety instantly left me, like a spell magically removed.
The reviews that were published in the following days and weeks reinforced the verdict of the first two, and I have never had such a unanimously favourable press for a novel since. It also received a fortuitous boost on television: Asa Briggs, who was moonlighting as a co-presenter of the BBC’s Book Show, started reading a copy of Changing Places he found at his bedside in the Hoggarts’ Paris apartment when he was staying with them, carried it off to finish it, and recommended it on the programme. Graham Watson wrote to congratulate me on the ‘ecstatic reviews’ which he was forwarding to Curtis Brown’s co-agency in New York, confident that they would stimulate keen interest from American publishers. Dick Odgers, who handled film and TV at Curtis Brown, was soon in negotiations with two producers about the film rights. To my delight the paperback rights were sold for a substantial sum to Penguin, an imprint I had always longed to be published under. Going through my files recently I found numerous forgotten letters of congratulation from friends and strangers, including one from Fredric Warburg (‘the Schweppeslike tingle of your wit is rare and delicious’) and another from Frank Kermode, who said, ‘I thought the novel a real beauty and am grateful for it.’ But the most moving discovery was a short letter from Dad, when he was halfway through the novel: ‘it’s great. Just how I would have liked to write if I had been a writer.’ As for my colleagues, it was some time before most of them got round to reading it, but Elsie Duncan-Jones was quick off the mark. Her positive reaction was a great relief to me and proved indicative of the general tenor of responses within the University. Very occasionally I sensed the disapproval of some individuals, but it was expressed through reserve, not explicit comment. As I had hoped, most of my colleagues enjoyed the book for what it was, a work of comic fiction.
The only downer in this euphoric period was that my long-promised celebratory lunch with Tom Rosenthal had to be postponed yet again, and for a very unfortunate reason. It was his custom to cycle to work from his home in Primrose Hill, and as he did so in the morning of the appointed day he was knocked over by a careless van driver, and injured badly enough to be taken to hospital. John Blackwell and I had a subdued lunch for two. Tom recovered and soon returned to work, but he suffered from back pain for the rest of his life in consequence of the accident. Later in the year he rang me to say that the Yorkshire Post, who awarded an annual prize for fiction, had told him they had reduced the field to two contenders, Changing Places and Malcolm’s The History Man, which had been published that autumn. This was the first occasion when our close association took a slightly awkward competitive turn – an accidental result of the miners’ strikes, because I’m sure Tom’s original plan had been to publish my book in 1974. It was a very small prize in monetary terms – £150 – but it would be a first for either of us. We made light of the situation on the phone, Malcolm quipping that the winner would get to sleep with Barbara Taylor Bradford, the bestselling, impeccably respectable Yorkshire novelist, but one of us was going to be disappointed, and in the event it was Malcolm. I suspected Tom would have wished him to win because of their longer association, but he was in Leeds to greet Mary and me warmly when we went up for the Literary Lunch at which the prize was presented – on this occasion by Lord Longford, already well known for his campaigning against pornography. The person who met him off the train at Leeds told me later that he had read my novel for the first time on his journey and had been greatly shocked by it. Apparently he was particularly upset by the scene in which Philip Swallow discusses his concern about the size of his penis with Morris Zapp’s wife Désirée, with whom he is having an affair. Lord Longford made his disapproval fairly clear in his speech presenting the award, and I almost had to prise the cheque from his fingers when I stepped up to receive it. Never mind: it was the first such feather in my cap, and I spent the money on a dishwasher, which could be described as buying more time for writing. Later I was surprised and delighted to be told that I had won the Hawthornden Prize, also of small monetary value but much more prestigious, having been won by several distinguished writers in its quite long history. Happily Malcolm won the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award for The History Man, but neither of us was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, though the judges that year rather snootily decided that only two novels were deserving of the honour instead of the usual six. The exclusion of The History Man was the more surprising, since it was a more serious, less playful novel than Changing Places, and in most people’s opinion, including my own, Malcolm’s masterpiece.
Changing Places was undoubtedly my ‘breakthrough’ book, and raised my profile significantly in the literary world. But it was not a really big, life-changing success, like Lucky Jim, or Room at the Top. The hardback appeared on no bestseller lists – I would guess it sold about 3,000 copies in its first year or two – and Penguin waited three years to bring out their edition, with a first printing of 15,000 which indicated a low expectation of sales. It sold out in two weeks, was rapidly reprinted, and has remained in print ever since, refreshed from time to time with new jacket designs. But to my surprise and disappointment it proved impossible to find an American publisher. Some seventeen of them turned it down, and the comment of a senior editor at Knopf was representative: ‘this is a very funny and lively example of a genre of English novel that is pure hell to do anything with here’. In his defence it must be said that Lucky Jim sold only 2,000 copies when it was first published in America. But when Penguin USA were persuaded to issue Changing Places in 1978 as a paperback original, with little or no promotion, it quickly found a readership, especially on university campuses, became essential reading for all American academic visitors to Britain, and again has been in print ever since. A Spanish translation was published in 1978 and a Czech one in 1980 but it was a long time before the book was available in some twenty other languages. The film rights were finally sold to the producer Otto Plaschkes, who had made a successful movie called Georgy Girl but proved unable to make one of Changing Places, although he tried hard for many years with an excellent script by Peter Nichols. Unfortunately it was customary in those days to sell film rights in perpetuity, thus preventing other interested producers from having a try.
That Changing Places acquired its reputation and increased its readership gradually, over decades, was in fact all to the good for my development as a writer. Producing a huge bestseller can be a burden for literary novelists, creating expectations that they will continue to produce the same kind of work – expectations which they may not wish or be able to fulfil. The reception of Changing Places restored my self-confidence as a writer of fiction, but it did not inhibit me from writing other kinds of novels subsequently. My next one would contain some comedy, and even farce, but in a darker and more ironic vein than its predecessor, as it followed the fluctuating fortunes and attitudes of more than a dozen Catholic men and women, from their youth in the early 1950s to the late ’70s, coping stressfully with courtship and marriage, faith and doubt, in an era of sexual revolution and an increasingly conflicted, pluralistic Catholic Church. The aim was to represent in less than 250 pages, by a kind of fast-forwarding narrative method, the great changes that had taken place during that period in Catholic belief and practice, including my own. In the process of researching and writing How Far Can You Go? my faith had been demythologised, and I had to recognise that I no longer believed literally in the affirmations of the Creed which I recited at mass every Sunday, though they did not lose all meaning and value for me. But that is a subject, among others, for another book.