David Lodge

Speaker 40:00

Hello, I'm Kirstie Young, and this is a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For rights reasons we've had to shorten the music. The programme was originally broadcast in nineteen eighty four, and the presenter was Roy Plumley.

Presenter0:29

Our castaway this week is a novelist. He's also a professor of modern literature at Birmingham University and author of a number of technical books on writing and criticism and other subjects arising from the English language. It's Professor David Lodge.

Presenter0:45

David, how would you view a spell on a tropical island, on your own?

David Lodge0:49

Well I quite like warm climates and beaches and swimming. I'm not sure whether I would cope with loneliness and isolation and lack of civilized amenities. Is music important? Yes it is. My father is a musician, a dance musician, but also interested in classical music. In fact, keenly interested in it. And so I grew up in a home that was oriented to music, though I never actually learned an instrument and I have no theoretical knowledge of music. I think I tend to use music as an alternative to my professional life, which is very sort of cerebral and analytical. So my attitude to music is very emotive and instinctual, really. I I use it for relaxation, for emotional luxuriance rather than for intellectual pleasure I suppose. Within those limits did you find it difficult to choose? Extremely difficult because I like a lot of different kinds of music, you know, classical, jazz, pop, rock, and you know, eight records just wasn't enough to reflect all the kind of music that I like. What's the first one you're going to play? Well the the first one is a track called Chocolate Apricot from an album called A Different Sort of Blues by two classical musicians or musicians known mainly for their classical work, Isaac Perlman, the celebrated violinist and Andrei Preven.

David Lodge2:07

It's a a record that my father introduced me to and it exactly reflects

David Lodge2:11

His interest in fusion between the jazz tradition and the classical tradition and my own liking for that kind of fusion and its very melodic and poignant kind of music.

Presenter3:21

Yitzhak Perlman and Andrei Previn Chocolate Apricot.

Presenter3:25

Yeah.

David Lodge3:25

Where were you born, David? I was born in Dulwich, in South London, and raised not very far from there in a another south east London suburb called Brockley. What were your interests as a boy?

Presenter3:37

How did you spend your time? Was it fret work or natural history or what?

David Lodge3:42

I mean, I think I was the kind of child who always wanted to have a hobby because that was what I thought boys ought to have and and yet somehow nothing ever really stuck except reading and writing. I was bookish, yes.

Presenter3:49

They were both writing.

David Lodge3:52

I used to enjoy games, but mostly street games. I was good at street football and street cricket, but not very good on the actual field.

David Lodge4:00

Do you look back on your childhood as a happy time?

David Lodge4:03

Well, it was overshadowed to some extent by the war. I was about four and a half when the war started. My father went into the Air Force, and so I was separated from him for most of the war. He was seldom at home. And I was also evacuated, not in the technical sense. I mean, I went with my mother to live in the country because of the Blitz. So that wartime was a time of being wrenched from one's roots and from security of the the whole family unit. But when we went back to London from when I was the age of ten onwards, it was perfectly happy, secure childhood, yes.

Speaker 14:29

Yeah.

David Lodge4:36

And

Presenter4:37

You went to university?

David Lodge4:38

I went to London University. I didn't really know there were any other universities apart from Oxford, Cambridge and London. We weren't very well prepared in those days for going to university. It was a relatively novel experience.

David Lodge4:49

And I didn't presume to apply to Oxford and Cambridge, so I applied to my local university and uh I went to university college. To read English. To read English, yes. With what in view? Did you think of yourself as teaching? Uh no, at that point I think I wanted to be a writer, perhaps a journalist. That was the vague ambition I had. I just thought that, you know, reading English at university would be a a reasonable preparation for that.

Presenter5:13

Your second record, what's that?

David Lodge5:14

This is from Monteverde's Magnificat in Six Voices. It's a version by a Bulgarian youth choir, and I picked it out of a box in a record shop really rather by chance, and was quite thrilled by the quality of the choral singing.

Speaker 45:41

I wanna be

Speaker 45:58

Oh bad.

Presenter6:23

Part of the Monte Verde Magnificat in Six Voices by the Bodras Miana Choir, which I'm told in Bulgarian means New Generation.

Presenter6:33

So you graduated from London University. In those days there was a a formality to be undergone, a formality called national service.

David Lodge6:41

I deferred that until I'd done my first degree, so I went into the army in nineteen fifty five, immediately after taking finals. Which regiment? I was conscripted into the Royal Armoured Corps and then eventually into the Royal Tank Regiment. Neither of these was my own choice, I may say. Did you think of Diddle Drive a tank? I certainly didn't. No, I I crawled inside a tank once, that was quite enough for me. I decided I didn't want to go into tanks anymore.

Presenter7:00

Take off.

David Lodge7:08

It was a curious sort of army rule that the the cavalry, the the armour corps were senior in the line. Therefore you could not transfer from the armour corps to something like the education corps which is where I might have been of some use. So I was stuck with the armour corps. I declined to be trained to be an officer. I was fairly sure they wouldn't make me one in the long run anyway.

Presenter7:28

Okay.

David Lodge7:30

Well, I yes, I I I became a clerk and then I I took various examinations which were f comparatively simple after an an honours degree and uh sort of made myself more money that way and eventually got two stripes.

Presenter7:42

Had you the time and space and inclination at that time to write?

David Lodge7:47

Oh yes. I mean, I determined that I if I was condemned to this two years of rather boring servitude, I would at least make use of the time to get on with some work. So in fact

David Lodge7:56

I wrote a a prize essay while I was in the army and um most of my first novel, The Picture Goers, while I was in the army.

Presenter8:03

The Prize Essay What Was the Prize?

David Lodge8:05

Well, it was, I think, um, fifty pounds. It was open to graduates of University College London in the year following their graduation. I wrote it, I think, on the eccentric character in English fiction.

Presenter8:15

And you had resolved that you wanted to be a novelist.

David Lodge8:18

Oh yes, by that time I had. I I I wrote a novel in my first long vocation as a student, which fortunately was never published but was a kind of apprenticeship. And then I I wrote this novel, The Picture Goes. I started it in the army and eventually it was published in nineteen sixty after I'd come out.

Presenter8:35

Right.

Presenter8:36

Well, there you are, you're a published novelist, let's have your third record.

David Lodge8:41

This is a jazz version of a well-known guitar concerto, Rodrigo's Concerto Di Anno RF.

David Lodge8:48

This is by Miles Davis, the the trumpeter, arranged and conducted by Gil Evans, who's a a great jazz composer. And I suppose I like this be again because it uh fuses two different kinds of musical traditions in a in a rather powerful and effective way.

Presenter10:00

An arrangement of the Rodrigo Concerto d'Orlang with Miles Davis.

Presenter10:07

So a published novelist

Presenter10:10

Were you going to be able to live as a writer, or did you have to take a job?

David Lodge10:13

Well, I never conceived the possibility of living on my earnings as a novelist. It was very much a part time spare time activity. No, at that point I decided that I would try and have an academic career. It seemed quite a good one with which to combine uh novel writing because of the amount of freedom and um

David Lodge10:30

long vacations and so on. So after about a year of trying I got a job at Birmingham University.

David Lodge10:37

It was a temporary job for one year, but they kept me on and I've been there ever since.

Presenter10:41

Tell me about that first novel, The Picture Goes. What was it about?

David Lodge10:45

Well, it's not a novel I care to reread or that I encourage other people to read now. It seems a very young piece of work to me. It was basically about a young man who is a student at London University and goes to live with a Catholic family in a in a suburb of London not so very different from the one I grew up in. And h he is an agnostic who becomes attracted to Catholicism through his uh contact with his family and his relationship, particularly with a young girl in the family who's just left the convent having abandoned her vocation. And as he becomes more and more religious and in and interested in Catholicism, she becomes more secular. I mean they in a sense have a love relationship, but they pass in opposite directions, as it were.

Presenter11:29

Like most first novels, was it to some degree autobiographical?

David Lodge11:33

Well that story is totally invented, but the background was completely autobiographical. I used the novel as a way of representing a kind of cross-section of uh

David Lodge11:42

society. The sort of device of the novel is all the characters, including these two young people, go to the cinema every Saturday night and to church on Sunday morning. I mean, Saturday night and Sunday morning would have been a very good title for the book if somebody hadn't used it before.

Presenter11:57

And your university post. You were in the English department. You were followed by a man with similar ambitions.

David Lodge12:04

Uh He came to the Birmingham English Department about a year after me and of course, you know, we'd both published a novel by then and um naturally we became friends and actually collaborators. Malcolm is a great collaborator and uh

Presenter12:05

Yeah.

Presenter12:16

Man.

David Lodge12:17

He interested me in the idea of writing comedy, I think. My first two novels. By that time I'd written a second one, by the time he came.

Presenter12:23

You wrote a book.

David Lodge12:24

Based on your army, exactly. You'll never join the army, you'll never be a scout with your shirt hanging out. That was the second book and came out in'62.

Presenter12:26

That's right, you know

David Lodge12:34

And uh that was rather rather a serious book, although it's been recently reissued with a rather comic cover by Penguin, rather to my disapproval. It did rather well, didn't it? Well, it was reasonably well received. It it's become a a sort of book that people who did national service refer to, I mean, as a kind of definitive book about that particular experience, I think.

Presenter12:55

So you could describe it as as a funny book, but not altogether funny, ha ha.

David Lodge12:59

I wouldn't describe it really as uh comic at all, no. I mean, it has its humorous moments, but uh no, I think of it as a rather serious novel. But Malcolm, as I say, was writing comedy, he was writing for Punch, he was writing comic fiction and

David Lodge13:12

He encouraged me to try my hand at that sort of thing. We collaborated in a couple of reviews while we were both at Birmingham, satirical reviews, and that was my first experience of writing deliberately to make people laugh, and I found I could do it quite well, and it was rather a revelation to me. A useful thing to find out.

Presenter13:31

Record number four.

David Lodge13:33

Well, record number four is a kind of memory of that particular phase of my life and my collaboration with Malcolm really. This is Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik.

David Lodge13:44

The second of the two reviews that we wrote for the the Birmingham Rep in collaboration with a young student of Birmingham University, Jim Duckett, now uh I'm afraid he d he died rather tragically young.

David Lodge13:56

In this second review we had a sketch which I think was Jim Duckett's idea called Eine Kleine Thought Music and the idea was that you had a little symphony orchestra or chamber orchestra who'd played this piece so often that they could do it in their sleep and they were thinking of other things while they were playing. So against the recorded sound of this piece by Mozart the actors would chant various random thoughts that were passing through their head like I think I'll paint the house a different shade of blue. I should have bought some carrots for tomorrow evening stew. My dog has gone and left me and I don't know what to do. And it was like that, you see. So this little piece of Mozart will remind me of the fun we had with those reviews.

Presenter15:33

An excerpt from Mozart's Eine Kleine Nachtmusik by the Berlin Philharmonic Orchestra conducted by Karl Bohr.

Presenter15:41

How did your reviews do at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre?

David Lodge15:44

Well the first one did quite well and was getting quite good audiences until halfway through its run President Kennedy was assassinated and in fact I actually heard the news of that in the middle of a performance of the revue and people stopped going to the theatre then for a week or two so attendances declined. There was one or two West End managements came up to look at it and we had dreams of it transferring to the West End and becoming rich and famous but that didn't work. The second one wasn't quite so successful.

Presenter16:12

But you found that experience of working in review in in burlesque in satire, call it what you will, rather liberating. It affected your

David Lodge16:20

I think it did. It encouraged me to write my next novel in very much a comic mode. See, it was fascinating to sit in an audience and hear people laughing, or not laughing, at your jokes. I mean, a novelist is rarely in a position to observe the immediate reaction of at least all his readers to what he's writing. But a writer for theatre can do that, and you you understand what makes people laugh and what doesn't.

Presenter16:37

Mm-hmm.

Presenter16:42

The next book, The British Museum is Falling Down, is full of pastiche and send-ups and sketches and

Presenter16:49

Well other writers are are sort of sent out rotten here and there.

David Lodge16:52

Yes, it's full of parody and literary jokes of one kind or another.

David Lodge16:57

Um in fact there are about ten parodies of specific writers embedded in the text and they become more and more sort of obvious as the book goes on. It's about a a young man who's working in the British Museum on the modern novel, whose domestic life is a source of considerable stress and anxiety to him, and sort of hallucinates in a rather Walter Mitty-ish way, so that life occasionally seems to take the form of the fiction that he's read.

Presenter17:22

And as in most of your books.

Presenter17:25

The Catholic conscience comes into it. Were you brought up as an Orthodox Catholic?

David Lodge17:30

Yes, I was. Um my father is not a Catholic, but my mother, who who uh sadly died a couple of years ago, was a Catholic and I was given a Catholic education and I think it's through the schooling that the Catholicism sort of stuck in me, as it were, because I've remained a Catholic.

Presenter17:46

You seem to have been troubled rather than comforted.

David Lodge17:48

Well, I think I'd be even more troubled if I weren't a Catholic, probably.

Presenter17:52

British Museum was a very funny book, and this was what you wanted, to write comedy.

David Lodge17:57

Well, I had at the same time a wish to write about a somewhat delicate and potentially embarrassing subject, that is the problems that Catholics in particular had about contraception because of the Church's teaching, which was then very much in debate. And it seemed to me that to treat this subject seriously would be, you know, extremely flesh creeping, really. But i i if I could treat it as um part of the eternal comedy of human sexuality, that it could be of more than parochial interest.

Presenter18:26

It was a book really that that gave you a style that that opened the floodgates, and you've never been a prolific

Presenter18:32

novelist, but uh what about four or five years between books?

David Lodge18:37

But that's partly because I had a second profession, an academic profession.

David Lodge18:41

And in order to advance in that, I have to write other kinds of books, literary critical books. In fact, I've attended to alternate a critical book and a novel, I think, over my career. So although my novels are spaced out, my books aren't all that spaced out.

Presenter18:51

Yes.

Presenter18:56

The next novel was Out of the Shelter, which I haven't read. What's that about?

David Lodge19:00

Yes, that was I suppose my least successful book, and in some ways my most autobiographical, personal book. It's about a young boy who was in London during the war and after in a rather sheltered environment, a lower middle class background, rather austerity.

David Lodge19:17

England of the forties, that sort of childhood.

David Lodge19:20

And then at the age of sixteen goes to Germany where his sister is working for the American Army of Occupation and living it up in a rather hedonistic and affluent expatriate American circle. And it's a sort of novel about a sort of rite of passage, a transference from childhood into youth, from austerity England into Europe, confronting the old hereditary enemy of Germany and also America and all that means culturally. Most of the novel takes place in this holiday of about three weeks when he sort of comes out of his shelter literally and metaphorically. But the whole publication of that book was deeply unfortunate for reasons I won't go into and it got very little attention.

David Lodge20:03

I hope maybe I'll be able to reissue it one of these days.

David Lodge20:07

Record number five. Record number five really relates to the novel The British Museum is Falling Down.

David Lodge20:13

It's uh the Georgian Ira Gershwin number a foggy day.

David Lodge20:18

which has a line in it, The British Museum Had Lost Its Charm.

David Lodge20:22

And this was the title I wanted to give to this novel.

David Lodge20:26

And I made this novel uh happen, the action all happen in one day, which is a foggy day, partly because of this song which I was very attached to.

David Lodge20:36

But the novel was in proof when I discovered that I should have asked permission I was rather innocent in those days of these things that I should have asked permission of the George Gershwin Publishing Company who owned the copyright. And when I did ask, they refused permission. And so at a very late stage I had to change the title to The British Museum is Falling Down. But this song for me is always very much associated with that novel and with my own days as a research student at the British Museum. This is Ella Fitzgerald and Louis Armstrong's version.

Speaker 421:09

I saw you fail And through foggy London town The sun was shining

Speaker 121:27

Baba Don't put it as fast but it would

Presenter21:36

Ella and Louie a Foggy Day in London Town.

Presenter21:40

David, two of your more recent books about university life are linked, Changing Places and Small World.

David Lodge21:47

Yes, but Small World is a sort of sequel to Changing Places, though when I wrote Changing Places I had no intention of writing a sequel. But um for reasons that had to do with that book I'd left the main characters in some suspense at the end without resolving their story, so it was quite easy, in fact, to use them again in this uh other book.

Presenter22:07

Into these books comes your impressions of the American university system.

David Lodge22:11

Yes. Well, I went to America for the first time in nineteen sixty four on a on a fellowship for a year, and I spent some time in the East Coast and some in the West, and it was a marvellous year for me, a very liberating experience.

David Lodge22:24

And I went back again in'69 as a visiting professor at Berkeley, California, where the student revolution was in full spate. I'd come from Birmingham where we'd had a rather genteel British sit-in in the autumn term with occupation of the administrative block and so on, but it was all very well mannered.

David Lodge22:44

And in contrast, in America there was something like a revolution going on with violent confrontations between the students and hippies on the one hand and the university authorities and the state government and Governor Reagan on the other.

David Lodge23:01

There were violent confrontations, uh shooting, gassing going on, so it was all rather like a civil war. There was also a lot of interesting experiment in various kinds of lifestyle. It was the height of the hippie flower power sort of era. And I wanted to write a novel which would

David Lodge23:20

incorporate that experience, but not just be another novel about an Englishman going to America. So I doubled up the plot and had an American going to England at the same time.

David Lodge23:30

Have you your idea?

Presenter23:31

Have your next novel ready?

David Lodge23:32

Uh

Presenter23:32

Yeah.

David Lodge23:33

Well, it's such a dim, distant idea that I wouldn't talk about it to anybody, hardly even myself.

Presenter23:40

You haven't had a jackpot yet. No television series, no movie.

David Lodge23:46

No, there is a possibility that changing places may be made into a film.

Presenter23:49

But you have

David Lodge23:50

It's been very pleasing that I have. I think I've been very lucky. Of course it's very encouraging for a writer to win prizes, I think.

Presenter23:58

It's more encouraging to have a big film.

David Lodge23:59

Contract

David Lodge24:01

But well well, maybe. But in fact, I used the prize that I won for How Far Can You Go to take time off to start my new novel, Small World. So it was useful financially as well as in a morale boosting sense.

Presenter24:11

Yeah.

Presenter24:16

Let's have another record. We got to number six.

David Lodge24:19

Number six is Dangling Conversation by Simon and Garfunkel.

David Lodge24:23

I like their music very much. I tend to use music a lot as background music, and I think they're very good background music, very good music to relax with a drink over. And I like this track particularly for its very American wit.

Speaker 424:40

And we sit and drink our coffee.

Speaker 424:46

Couched in our indifference, Like shells upon the shore, You can hear the ocean roar.

Speaker 424:55

In the dining conversation.

Speaker 424:59

And a superficial sigh.

Speaker 425:03

The borders of our life

Presenter25:08

Simon and Garfunkel Dangling Conversation.

Presenter25:12

In addition to your novels, you write these academic books which I don't pretend to understand. What is structuralism?

David Lodge25:19

Well, it's it's basically a method of analysis which is used by all kinds of subjects in the humanities. It's a way of trying to understand how culture works by uncovering the rules, laws, conventions, constraints that underlie, for instance, language, for instance advertising, uh film, as well as literature and poetry and so on. So it it's if you like trying to write grammars for the various systems by which we communicate with each other in human societies.

Presenter25:53

I'll have another shot.

Presenter25:55

Record number seven.

David Lodge25:58

Record number seven is by Joni Mitchell. I'm rather addicted to female vocalists in the sort of rock, soul, folk, jazz idioms. And I mean I could very easily have chosen eight records by singers of this kind. So Joni Mitchell in a way represents a whole raft of lady singers who turn me on. But she I think is a very very gifted one. I mean she's um such a good writer and singer and guitar player. And this is a nice track with a kind of country and western quality to it and quite sexy little record as well.

Speaker 426:38

You're driving into town

Speaker 426:41

With a dark cloud above you, darling

Speaker 426:45

Balloon, oh honey, you turn me on I'm a radio, I'm a country station, I'm a little bit corny, I'm a

Speaker 426:58

Why I would fly waiting for

Speaker 427:03

Road doesn't turn

Presenter27:06

Joni Mitchell, you turn me on.

Presenter27:09

Now you're on this island, David. How are you going to manage? Can you look after yourself?

David Lodge27:14

I don't know. I'm not really very good at the outdoor life. I mean, the word camping has a somewhat dire sound to my ears.

David Lodge27:21

I would just hope that the climate would be so benign that I wouldn't have to worry too much about

Presenter27:26

There are going to be storms. You'd better have a shelter of some sort.

David Lodge27:28

Well, I suppose I could improvise something. I mean, I I'm I'm quite good at bodging jobs rather than doing jobs properly, so perhaps I could improvise. What about food? Done any fishing? I have done fishing. I'm I never caught very much. I'm not very good at it. I just about know how to fish, I think.

Presenter27:43

Would you try to escape?

David Lodge27:45

No, I think not. I mean, I'm rather really rather timid. I'd be afraid of uh going to launch out into the ocean on a raft or something like that.

Presenter27:53

That's a good, honest statement, and I applaud it. We've got to your last record.

David Lodge27:59

Well, I think I must have something in the great European post-romantic symphonic tradition. Uh and out of many possibilities I I think I would choose Elgar's Enigma variations very much in one's mind at the moment because of the centenary and what else but Nimrod, which I suppose is everybody's favourite movement. Uh it's wonderfully melodic and somehow serene music I think.

Presenter29:24

Nimrod from Elgar's Adigma Variations, Sir Adrian Bolt conducting the London Symphony Orchestra.

Presenter29:31

If you could take just one disk out of your egg, which would it be?

David Lodge29:35

Frightfully difficult question, um but I think I'd take the Elgar because I think I could stand to hear it again and again and again.

Presenter29:42

and one luxury to choose one object of no practical use which would give you pleasure to have with you.

David Lodge29:48

Well, if there's absolutely no price limit on this, then we'll.

Presenter29:50

Donato

Presenter29:52

Yeah.

Presenter29:52

Pay the bill whatever it is.

David Lodge29:54

Well, I think I'd like to take a rather high class pin up. I mean, a nude by some master of painting. I was at the Venetian exhibition at the Royal Academy recently and there was a picture called Nymph in a Landscape by an artist called Palma Vecchio.

Presenter30:10

Would you like that one?

David Lodge30:10

I would like that very much, yes.

Presenter30:12

Good, that will be arranged.

Presenter30:14

and one book apart from the conventionally obvious choices of the Bible and complete works of Shakespeare, which are already there.

David Lodge30:21

Well, given my profession, you can imagine this was a difficult choice as well. But I think I would take James Joyce's Ulysses, which is the novel I revere most in English fiction and which um I've read many times but could well look forward to reading again many more times.

Presenter30:35

And thank you, David Lodge, for letting us hear your Desert Island discs.

David Lodge30:39

Thank you, Roy.

Presenter30:40

Goodbye, everyone.

Speaker 430:47

You've been listening to a podcast from the Desert Island Discs Archive. For more podcasts, please visit bbc.co.uk slash radio four.

Speaker 431:19

Uh