James Joyce is one of David Lodge's literary heroes. From Ulysses in particular he learned much that influenced and assisted him in his own stellar career as one of the great novelists of our time.
Joyce’s insights into Catholicism, his use of liturgical imagery, and the stylistic and formal innovations he introduced to the fiction, were all hugely formative. However, the most important thing Lodge learned from Joyce was to “make the work as good as one is capable of making it”.
He quotes an anecdote told by Frank Budgen: Joyce bumped into Budgen and said he had been up all night working on one sentence in Ulysses. "Looking for the right words?" "No, I have the words already. What I am seeking is the perfect order of the words in the sentence."
In this outstanding memoir, Lodge remembers the first 40 years of his life, ending what is presumably part one of the whole autobiography with an account of the publication of the novel which brought him international renown, the hilarious campus satire Changing Places.
In his lucid and witty prose, he writes the story of his personal life, academic career, and experience as a reader and a writer. Moreover, as the title suggests, he contextualises all his own experience perfectly in history: political, social, philosophical, religious and literary.
In his novels, he succeeds in portraying individuals caught in the complex web of history (where we all live), and he brings his immense talent for weaving the multiple strands of life into an entertaining narrative to the story of his own life.
1935 was a good year to be born in, in London, for many reasons, but for two in particular. It meant Lodge experienced the trauma of the second World War as a child, but was too young to be a soldier. Perhaps more significantly, he benefited from the Education Act of 1944, which initiated free secondary school and university education. Had he been born a few years earlier, he would almost certainly not have gone to university.
As it was, he got a scholarship to University College London (it did not occur to him even to apply to Oxford or Cambridge), graduated with first class honours in English, and the rest is the fascinating history of a novelist, critic and professor.
Clear and amused gaze
Living in a time of change is always useful to a writer, and Lodge has experienced much, less as an activist than as a compassionate and wry observer. Like many novelists he is a sort of anthropologist. His clear and amused gaze, in the portrait of him as a boy of six or seven on the cover of this book, is duplicated exactly in the photograph on the flap of the 79-year-old writer. There is a confidence in the expression in both portraits which informs all his writing.
He is always measured, lucid and entertaining. The biography confirms that he writes about change in the world about him from a position of blessed emotional security.
He was the beloved only child of a mother who waited on him hand and foot, and a charming artistic father. On his first day in college he met Mary, fell in love with her, and married her seven or eight years later. She is still his wife and the first reader of all his work. He moved fairly directly from college to an academic position. He gives a full account of the process of applications and interviews, with insights into the networking that went on, and reports on all the posts he did not get as well as his successes – not many people do this!
Lodge writes about the condition of England and the human condition, but a few strands predominate in the fiction and in this book: Catholicism, the academic scene, and literature. His father, a professional saxophonist, was Protestant, but his mother was the Catholic child of half Belgian and Irish parents. Lodge was brought up a practising Catholic, and remains one to this day.
The memoir charts the intersection of the personal with the larger sociological context all the way through (from the war to the Education Act to feminism), but it is particularly concerned with the role of Catholicism.
Contraception
Readers of his novels will be familiar with his questioning of the Catholic stance on contraception. Here he tells us that he and Mary did not have sex until they were married, thanks to their orthodox Catholicism. Once married, they were forbidden by the rules of the church to use artificial contraception. They trusted the “natural method”, recommended by the church. The result was an immediate pregnancy, followed by two more in quick succession.
Mary Lodge, a gifted schoolteacher, had to give up her job. Eventually, after the birth of their third child, both she and David decided to avail of contraception. The Pill had become available in the early 1960s.
Lodge's asides on certain aspects of Catholic teaching are striking. Writing of the Penny Catechism questions and answers, he notes that according to that, the divine punishment for missing Mass on Sunday was the same as that for, say, murdering your mother (ie off you go to hell.) That nobody, himself included, questioned the fairness of this is a matter of interest.
He mentions in another aside that the Catholic rules on contraception ignore the health of women – never, I suppose, an issue which patriarchs, religious or secular, have lost much sleep over.
The elephant in the room for an Irish writer, born just in time to avail of free education here (about 25 years after it was introduced in the UK) is, why bother with the Catholic Church at all? After the 1980s, when the Irish equivalents of Lodge came of literary age, the exploration of Catholicism begins to recede from Irish fiction, for various reasons – there was so much of it in earlier writing, and Irish writers of that era largely abandoned Catholicism.
Lodge is fascinating because he remained Catholic, and explored it in the best possible literary way.
The memoir ends on an intriguing note, in which he writes that “I no longer believed literally in the affirmations of the Creed which I recited at Mass every Sunday . . . But that is a story for another day.”
We look forward to the sequel.
Éilís Ní Dhuibhne is the recipient of the 2015 Pen Award for an Outstanding Contribution to Irish Literature.
