Lives of the Novelists: A History of Fiction in 294 Lives (142 page)

Flashman
was the book of the day and the business with the flag has striking similarities with Farrell’s episode in
The Siege of Krishnapur
. More interesting are the two authors’ similar views about Empire. Like Farrell, Fraser was clearly inspired by the wholly amazing collapse of the British Empire, which had been a supposedly permanent thing, between Harold Macmillan’s ‘Wind of Change’ speech in 1960 and Denis Healey’s pull back from ‘East of Suez’ in 1967. In what was, historically, the blinking of an eye, it was gone. As Fraser observed:

No generation has seen their country so altered, so turned upside down, as children like me born in the 20 years between the two world wars … Other lands have known what seem to be greater upheavals, the result of wars and revolutions, but these do not compare with the experience of a country which passed in less than a lifetime from being the mightiest empire in history, governing a quarter of mankind, to being a feeble little offshore island whose so-called leaders have lost the will and the courage, indeed the ability, to govern at all.

Not even Gibbon could have made it a dramatic story. It was not epic, nor tragic – only comedy would serve. The end of Empire was a peculiarly British, more specifically an English, event. It was something that the Irish and Scottish novelist, connected but not central, might be expected to see more clearly – and, to add to the comedy, that Americans had difficulty seeing at all. They never quite got the point.
As Fraser recalled, ‘when
Flashman
appeared in the US in 1969, one-third of fortyodd critics accepted it as a genuine historical memoir. “The most important discovery since the Boswell papers” is the one that haunts me still … I’d never supposed that it would fool anybody … And fifty British critics had recognised it as a conceit.’

Fraser had come to such conceits late in life. He was born the son of a doctor and a nurse, in the historically uneasy borderlands between Scotland and England. His novels
The Steel Bonnets
(1971) and
The Candlemass Road
(1993) are set there. Genetically, he was from North of the Border and proud of it: ‘My forebears from the Highlands of Scotland were a fairly primitive, treacherous, blood-thirsty bunch and, as Robert Louis Stevenson once wrote, would have been none the worse for washing. Fine, let them be so depicted, if any film maker feels like it; better that than insulting, inaccurate drivel like
Braveheart
.’ He was educated at grammar school and had hopes of a medical career, but couldn’t pass his Latin exams. Aged eighteen, he volunteered for the Border Regiment in 1943 and fought with the ‘forgotten’ 14th army (as did fellow novelist Brian Aldiss) in Burma. He rose – somewhat inconsistently – through the ranks and was commissioned after the war into the Gordon Highlanders. He saw active service in such post-war hotspots as the Middle East and North Africa as the British Empire creaked on its way to dissolution. His military service is commemorated in the wry memoir
Quartered Safe Out Here
(1992) and his ‘McAuslan’ stories, which follow the career of the incorrigibly wayward Private John McAuslan, ‘the dirtiest soldier in the world’.

Fraser left the army in 1947 (the year that India left the Empire) to work as a journalist. He married a fellow journalist, Kathleen Hetherington, in 1949, and had three children. They emigrated to Canada in the early 1950s but returned after a year to Glasgow where Fraser embarked on a fifteen-year stint on the
Glasgow Herald
. He rose steadily from sub-editor to deputy editor but, failing to get the top job on the paper, he resolved, aged forty-four and encouraged by his wife, ‘to write his way out’ with a novel –
Flashman
as it would be. Drawing on his journalist’s fluency, ‘it took 90 hours, no advance plotting, no revisions, just tea and toast and cigarettes at the kitchen table’. After its insulting round of rejection by London’s major publishers,
Flashman
took off like a rocket. Fraser was, within a year, rich enough to take tax exile on the Isle of Man.
Flashman
volumes pulsed regularly from his typewriter as did even more lucrative film screenplays and other books – such as a homage to Sabatini,
The Pyrates
(1983) – which he had always wanted to write. One of the more interesting of his non-fiction works is
The Hollywood History of the World
(1988), in which he argued for popular film as a great educator as to the nature of the past. The argument applies to his own popular romance, founded as it is on impressive research, buttressed with owlishly pedantic footnotes to get up the nose of the academics.

Fraser had rather more mixed views about Empire than Farrell. He saw it as a gigantic fake, but admired the ‘standards and values’ which it generated – even Flashy behaves with decency, when the chips are down. He was, Fraser liked to say, a believer in – not an enemy of – the Empire and, with unusual appropriateness, was awarded an OBE in 1999. By this period he had become thoroughly brassed off with post-imperial Britain and, in 2008 (the Flashman saga having concluded in 2005), he loosed a final salvo:

The United Kingdom has begun to look more like a Third World country, shabby, littered, ugly, run down, without purpose or direction, misruled by a typical Third World government, corrupt, incompetent and undemocratic … I feel I speak not just for myself but for the huge majority of my generation who think as I do but whose voices are so often lost in the clamour. We are yesterday’s people, the over-the-hill gang. (Yes, the old people – not the senior citizens or the time-challenged, but the old people.) Those of ultra-liberal views may take consolation from this – that my kind won’t be around much longer, and then they can get on with wrecking civilisation in peace.

He wouldn’t be around much longer, dying a few months later of cancer through whose long affliction he had written a number of his later works.

I had been aware for some time (and you, gentle reader, have no doubt made the same observation) that I had not only strayed into a zone of Jamesian ironies as a result of writing
Author, Author,
but I was in some measure re-enacting the story of my own novel.

Those who have kept David Lodge company over the nearly fifty years of his novel-writing career will be able to construct a CV from the words on the fictional page, supplemented by throwaway comments in interviews and essays. Born in London, an only child, David was evacuated during the Blitz with his mother to the safety of the rural southwest. This figures in the opening, 1940s section of
Out of the Shelter
(1970). In
The Year of Henry James
(2006), Lodge discloses, in passing, that
he is ‘a quarter Irish’. His publisher, Tom Rosenthal, liked to disclose that Lodge is ‘part Jewish’. His upbringing, however, was wholly Catholic: ‘My mother,’ he has written ‘was a dutiful but undemonstrative daughter of the Church.’ His father was ‘a jobbing musician’ who served in an RAF dance-band during the war, in a succession of remote but safe postings. The father of the hero in
Deaf Sentence
(2008), Lodge informs us, is as close a representation as is the hero himself (retired university professor of English with hearing problems) of Lodge Jr. In the novel, aged a frail ninety, Desmond’s dad lives in the same house that the Lodge family did, in Brockley, southeast London (‘Brickley’ in the novels). Desmond’s mother has been dead for a long while: she was ‘twenty-five years as an underpaid clerk in the office of a local builders’ merchant’ (if we follow the novel).

Young Lodge sailed through the eleven-plus and went to a Catholic grammar school in Blackheath. Like other lonely children of the 1940s, he loved the velvety comforts of the cinema –
The Picturegoers
(1960). His ‘Saturday Night and Sunday Morning’ were ‘Flicks and Mass’. He was clever, but the school had no easily opened doors to Oxbridge and he was put off ‘because he’d read enough Waugh to know that it was all getting debagged in the quad by raving drunken aristocrats’. He got a first in English at UCL, the godless (and wholly aristocratless) place in Gower Street, then did his two years’ national service. The experience angered him: not just the army, but the class system which underpinned it – ‘All those upper-class chinless wonders.’ As an ‘angry young man’ (he recalls the impact of Osborne’s
Look Back in Anger
on him), he got an AYM novel,
Ginger You’re Barmy
(1962), out of his two years in the Royal Armoured Corps. The hero, as did Lodge, presumably, refuses to let himself be put forward for officer training: ‘I felt that if I became an officer I’d be participating in that injustice.’ Like Bartleby, he’d rather not.

On demob, he returned to do an MA at UCL on Graham Greene. This supplied the raw material for
The British Museum is Falling Down
(1965). The novel portrays the UCL English Department, then in a sad state of post-war decay, with as savage a comedy as publisher Secker & Warburg’s libel lawyers would allow. The copyright lawyers forbade him his first choice of title, ‘The British Museum has Lost its Charm’. Lodge takes a rueful delight in how ‘the first batch of review copies was mysteriously lost, and never reached a single newspaper or magazine’. The novel was met with thundering critical silence. None the less he remained loyal to the publisher (and to UCL). On graduation in 1959 Lodge married Mary Frances Jacob, a fellow student and fellow Catholic whom he had known for six years. He worked briefly for the British Council (who, he later discovered, thought little of him). The early years of marriage were ‘very precarious financially … We were attempting to use the permitted form of Catholic birth control that didn’t work very well. We had
two children within four years, and then another one, and then we made a rational decision to use birth control.’

Unfunny in life, the birth control problem supplies the extremely funny first scene in
The British Museum is Falling Down
, where Adam’s wife – attempting to work out the ‘rhythm’ method – lies in bed with so many thermometers sticking out of her that she resembles a hedgehog in heat, while he prepares to go out and slave under Panizzi’s dome. Lodge went further into the issues of New Catholicism in
How Far Can You Go
? (1980), a novel which brought him, as he says, to the ‘edge of belief’. The question in the title, in those pre-pill days, normally referred to ‘heavy petting’, as it was called. Sexual temptation crops up frequently in his fiction.
Changing Places
(1975), for example, could as readily be called ‘Changing Spouses’. Lodge wittily describes himself as a war reporter – not a combatant – in the battle of the sexes.

Lodge’s career was set with his appointment to a tenured position in the English Department at Birmingham (‘Rummidge’ in the Philip Sparrow novels). Here it was his path crossed with that of Malcolm Bradbury, the novelist with whom his name is routinely associated, and sometimes facetiously merged (‘Bradlodge’, or ‘Blodge’). As the dedication to
The British Museum is Falling Down
testifies, it was Bradbury who shrewdly persuaded Lodge to forego realism for ironic comedy as his dominant narrative mode. In his campus novels, Lodge offers a more subtle critique of higher education than anything that has ever come out of Whitehall. What, for example, is the balance, or useful friction, between Oxbridge, metropolitan, provincial and ‘new’ universities? The implied answer, in
Thinks …
(2001), is that new universities are, as their name implies, the most open conduits to new thinking. What,
Changing Places
makes the reader wonder, can the American and British systems learn from each other? Does the pressure-cooking of scholarship in off-campus ‘conferences’ raise its quality, or does this ‘Small World’ privilege an elite of in-group hierophants, speaking a dialect the outside world (including the undergraduate community) cannot understand?

When asked how he came across the idea for
Deaf Sentence
(2008), a rueful cogitation on his late-life loss of hearing, and the loss of his father, he recalled: ‘Well, it came to me as a comic novel, as I was shaving and thinking about some recent humiliation’. The H-word is resonant. In
Changing Places,
the hero Philip Sparrow introduces his American hosts to a parlour game called Humiliation. The winner is the academic who can honestly reveal the most famous work of literature he
hasn’t
read. The game is won by an over-achieving American who trumps all other shameful omissions by confessing never to have read
Hamlet
. His tenure prospects are blown. To win is to lose: to lose is to win.

Humiliation is the climate of Lodge’s fiction, and flavours the image of himself which he has cultivated for his readers (no more genuine, one suspects, than Charlie Chaplin’s tramp outfit). The major novel of his late period,
Author, Author
(2004), is a veritable stew in which every ingredient is a variety of humiliation. The author is Henry James. His friend George du Maurier offers him the idea for a novel – a Jewish hypnotist who can ‘create’ a great opera singer out of a street girl. Henry turns it down: ‘not my line’. Du Maurier goes on to write the superseller,
Trilby
. Mrs Humphry Ward, whom James has encouraged to write fiction, sells a million or more with the clodhopping
Robert Elsmere
. He, meanwhile, can’t clear a thousand of
The Aspern Papers
. What, he asks his friend H. G. Wells, is he up to? Something called
The Time Machine
, he is told. Everyone’s stuff sells like hot cakes except ‘the master’s’ stuff. And then, the crowning humiliation: at the end of the first night of his play,
Guy Domville
, that he expects to make his fortune, he is mischievously called on to the stage – ‘Author! Author!’ – only to be hooted off it. Loser.