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DAVID LODGE CHANGING PLACES

‘A magnificent comic novel’ Guardian

DAVID LODGE

David Lodge (1935–2025) taught English Literature at the University of Birmingham for many years before retiring to focus on his writing full time. His novels received the Hawthornden Prize and the Whitbread Book of the Year Award, and he was twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize. He also wrote several esteemed volumes of literary criticism.

David held several honorary doctorate degrees and was a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In 1998, he was awarded a CBE for services to literature.

ALSO BY DAVID LODGE

FICTION

The Picturegoers Ginger, You’re Barmy

The British Museum is Falling Down Out of the Shelter

How Far Can You Go?

Small World

Nice Work

Paradise News

Therapy

Home Truths

Thinks . . . Author, Author Deaf Sentence

A Man of Parts

The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up and Other Stories

CRITICISM

Language of Fiction

The Novelist at the Crossroads

The Modes of Modern Writing Working with Structuralism After Bakhtin

ESSAYS

Write On The Art of Fiction

The Practice of Writing Consciousness and the Novel

The Year of Henry James Lives in Writing

DRAMA

The Writing Game

Home Truths

Secret Thoughts

MEMOIRS

Quite a Good Time to be Born Writer’s Luck

Varying Degrees of Success

DAVID LODGE CHANGING PLACES

WITH A EULOGY BY David Edgar

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A EULOGY

In his biographical novel about Henry James, Author, Author, David imagined attending James’s deathbed and being able to tell the great American-born writer about his legacy. Henry James died out of fashion, but the time-transported David could assure him that, after a period of obscurity, James would come to be seen as an essential part of the literary canon, published, translated, studied and adapted around the world, with the late novels in particular – greeted with bafflement and indifference at the time – acknowledged as the foundation stones of the modern psychological novel after his death.

Today, it’s impossible not to speculate what David would have liked to have heard, before he died, from a future novelist, about his place in history.

Well, the obituaries – I nearly said ‘reviews’ – should have reassured him; the Daily Telegraph: ‘a novelist of the first order’; The Times: ‘one of the most successful and admired novelists of his era’; Jonathan Coe in the Guardian: ‘It’s largely thanks to him that the British comic novel remains in good health.’ But David being David, he might nonetheless have found something to disappoint or concern. After all, this is a man who titled the third volume of his memoirs Varying Degrees of Success. This volume covered a period in which, on top of the memoirs, David wrote two biographical and three original novels (Thinks . . . and Deaf Sentence being particularly glowingly received), an awardwinning television adaptation of Martin Chuzzlewit, a third and also award-winning stage play (alongside the broadcast of the

first), and four important works of criticism. ‘Varying Degrees of Success’? Yeah, sure.

For although David could be enjoyable and witty company, especially for those lucky enough to be part of the regular Writers’ Lunch which he hosted at the Chung Ying restaurant in central Birmingham, this chronicler of wild Rabelaisian abandon could in person appear reticent, donnish and even dour, leading at least one visiting interviewer to the Lodge home to speculate whether the funny bits were actually written by his wife, Mary. Not a bit of it, of course (though she read and commented on everything). In fact, as with almost all writers, ‘David Lodge’ could never have been a nom de plume: his work is taken from a very particular life. The 1970 Out of the Shelter starts with a small child in wartime London (Brockley represented as ‘Brickley’); the earlier The Picturegoers brings a young aspirant writer together with an idealised version of Mary’s family; Ginger, You’re Barmy is about David’s experience of national service. Then there are the Catholic novels – though in a way they’re all the Catholic novels – confronting the agonies and ecstasies of growing up in a church split between the reformists of the Second Vatican Council and the conservatism of the 1968 papal encyclical, Humanae Vitae, which confirmed the church’s traditional position on contraception; this dominated the plot of the 1965 The British Museum is Falling Down and the 1980 How Far Can You Go? David’s lectureship at Birmingham, aka Rummidge, and visiting associate professorship at Berkeley, aka Euphoric State, inspired the first campus novel Changing Places in 1975, to be followed by Small World and Nice Work. Having, you might say, run out of his own life, David’s work then moved inwards and outwards. Inwards to discourses on illness and grief in 1991’s Paradise News and, in this century, on various forms of healing in Therapy, theories of human consciousness in Thinks…, and his own affliction in Deaf Sentence; as well as outwards to the past, telling the stories of his antecedents in Author, Author and in his 2011 novel about H. G.Wells, A Man of Parts.

Writing biographically has its problems – David famously wrote about his distress that the James book was published simultaneously with Colm Tóibín’s novel on the same subject; as a writer whose work has also occasionally and annoyingly overlapped with that of his peers, I thought David’s essay on the matter (The Year of Henry James) was refreshingly honest and insightful, though some thought it self-serving. David also acknowledged his and his colleagues’ unease at the portraits he painted of contemporary academic life, one of his reasons for leaving teaching in 1987. And it wasn’t just his professional colleagues who feared that they might find themselves in his pages. Deaf Sentence is one of the most directly autobiographical of the novels: on top of being deaf, Desmond Bates is a retired academic, with a saxophonist father succumbing to Alzheimer’s, and a strong-willed wife. In the novel, Desmond hosts a Boxing Day party, finds he’s run out of hearing-aid batteries, knows he won’t be able to listen to anyone else, and so uses the opportunity to lecture a left-wing playwright on the errors of his play about the miners’ strike. Well, I’m a left-wing playwright, and I’ve written a play about the miners’ strike. I hadn’t attended a Boxing Day party at the Lodges’, but then neither had David, as he, Mary and their son Christopher were regular attenders at our Boxing Day party, at which they gave a persuasive impression of having a pretty good time. They certainly ate enough. Confronted, when I’d read the book, with this Goneril-like level of social ingratitude, David affected to have mislaid his hearing aid.

So what did David do with the life and the lives he drew on?

Well, first, as Jonathan Coe underlined, there was the comedy; not just the wit (though there was enough of that, including of course the whole idea of the game of Humiliation). David was a master of the tried-and-tested comic set piece, from the chase around the backways of the British Museum to the hotel bedroom farce of Small World; from outrageous coincidences to double entendres and mistaken identities. If I had to single out one laugh-out-loud moment from Changing Places – hard enough

to do – it would be the baffled Professor Masters misunderstanding how circulating paternoster lifts operate, and standing on his head as it goes over the top. If I were required to select a favourite verbal gag from Small World – even harder – it would be the enquiry by the Japanese translator of Ronald Frobisher’s gritty proletarian novel Could Try Harder as to the meaning of the hero’s unexpected culinary request to his wife: ‘Bugger me, but I feel like some faggots tonight.’

And then there was the sheer ingenuity of the plotting and the wealth of light-touch literary reference with which it was so often intertwined. Nice Work is about a getting-to-understandyou professional exchange between a female academic and the boss of a Rummidge engineering firm. Its wonderfully elegant last chapter ignites the brilliantly laid plotting fuses that simultaneously solve the financial and career problems of the protagonists, in the manner of the mid-Victorian industrial novels by which David’s novel was inspired. David’s encyclopaedic knowledge of the literary canon – he would fail lamentably at Humiliation – also led to a series of literary parodies, from The British Museum is Falling Down, where Barbara Appleby evokes Molly Bloom’s Ulysses monologue, onwards. David was particularly skilled at employing – and where necessary pastiching – different modes of non-literary writing, from letters to press cuttings, from lectures to diaries, from small ads to suicide notes. In Therapy, intercut monologues we assume to have been written by minor characters turn out to have been penned by the protagonist. The last chapter of Changing Places is a film script.

In these devices David drew on his own scholarship, particularly of modernist writing and postmodernist criticism. He concluded that structuralism – about which he wrote an important early book – was spent by the turn of the century, though he continued to enjoy its babble (Professor Morris Zapp’s insistence that ‘every decoding is another encoding’) and employ some of its tropes. His academic writings influenced

generations of students and other writers. If I make particular mention of The Modes of Modern Writing it is not just because it introduced me to a canon of work I knew I should know better than I do – my Humiliation winner: Ulysses – but because its analysis of metaphor and metonym ( patiently explained in the book and in person) has helped me to understand my own craft, then and now. Unsurprisingly, a writer who understood and enjoyed different literary forms was going to indulge in crossgenre dabbling; like Henry James, he was justly disappointed by the failure of his three adept and witty stage plays to have London outings (two of them about novelists, interestingly); his television adaptations of Dickens and Lodge (Chuzzlewit and Nice Work) confirmed his skills weren’t confined to the page. Satire is about exaggeration and it inevitably tends towards cynicism. It’s superficially surprising that Jonathan Coe insisted on the poignant truthfulness – personal and social – that underlay David’s work, particularly in its endings. Tubby Passmore in Therapy finds healing in the arms of a former lover on a pilgrimage. Deaf Sentence is predicated on the idea that blindness is tragic but deafness is comic, but after much uproarious comedy the novel ends with Desmond’s visit to Auschwitz, his father’s death from Alzheimer’s and his admission that he had assisted in the death of his cancer-ridden wife.

And while David was not a political radical or even less a utopian – as any left-wing playwright caught in his glare can attest – Nice Work contains a heartfelt critique of the Thatcherite revolution which was destroying British industry and threatening British universities. Its penultimate chapter ends with Robyn Penrose’s utopian vision of Vic Wilcox’s workers transported from the hellhole of his foundry to the dappled lawns of the Rummidge campus on a sunny day, to be welcomed by beautiful students and their teachers, eager to exchange ideas with the workers on ‘how the values of the university and the imperatives of commerce might be reconciled and more equitably managed to the benefit of the whole of society’. At which point Robyn

realises that Professor Swallow was talking to her, and confesses, ‘I was daydreaming.’

In The Tempest, Prospero speaks of actors as ‘such stuff as dreams are made on’ whose ‘little life is rounded with a sleep’. But writers are dream-makers too. Now, after his long battle with dementia is over, David’s life is rounded with a sleep, but the dreams he conjured with such virtuoso brilliance – from Rummidge to Europhic State and the whole Small World in between – will clearly survive him. As they will survive us all.

David Edgar

Delivered at David Lodge’s funeral 21 February 2025