Cover
About the Book
About the Author
Also by David Lodge
Title Page
Introduction
Changing Places
Dedication
1. Flying
2. Settling
3. Corresponding
4. Reading
5. Changing
6. Ending
Small World
Dedication
Epigraph
Prologue
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Five
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Nice Work
Dedication
Epigraph
Part One
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Two
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Three
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Four
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Part Five
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Chapter 3
Chapter 4
Part Six
Chapter 1
Chapter 2
Copyright
The plot lines of The Campus Trilogy, radiating from its hub at the redbrick University of Rummidge, trace the comic adventures of academics who move outside familiar territory. Beginning in the late ’60s, Changing Places follows the undistinguished English lecturer Philip Swallow and hotshot American professor Morris Zapp as they exchange jobs, habitats and eventually wives. Small World sees Swallow, Zapp, Persse McGarrigle and the beautiful Angelica Pabst jet-set about the international conference scene, combining academic infighting and tourism, esoteric chat and romance. And finally, the feminist lecturer Robyn Penrose swaps the industrial novel for a hard hat in Nice Work as she shadows the factory boss Victor Wilcox. Sparks fly when their beliefs and lifestyles collide.
David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks..., Author, Author and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.
ALSO BY DAVID LODGE
Fiction
The Picturegoers
The British Museum is Falling Down
Out of the Shelter
How Far Can You Go?
Paradise News
Therapy
Home Truths
Thinks …
Author, Author
Deaf Sentence
A Man of Parts
Criticism
The Language of Fiction
The Novelist at the Crossroads
The Modes of Modern Writing
Working with Structuralism
After Bakhtin: Essays on Fiction and Criticism
Essays
Write On
The Art of Fiction
The Practice of Writing
Consciousness and the Novel
The Year of Henry James
Twentieth Century Criticism
Drama
The Writing Game
Home Truths
The campus novel is a mainly Anglo-American literary phenomenon. The first classic example was American, Mary McCarthy’s The Groves of Academe (1952), followed in England by Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim in 1954, some years before we had adopted the word ‘campus’ to describe the enclosed territory of a university or college which makes it such an inviting location for a story. (One reason why there are very few European campus novels is that the typical Continental European university is less clearly demarcated, architecturally and socially, from its environment.) There had been novels about student life before the 1950s, of course, but what was distinctive about the campus novel was its focus on the lives of academic staff. It continued to evolve as higher education expanded in the post-war period and more and more novelists, or aspiring novelists, took jobs in universities, as I did myself. I don’t think many of us set out to write a ‘campus novel’ as one might set out to write a detective story or any other kind of fiction with formulaic components and conventions. We were trying to give literary form to ideas and experiences which had come to us in an academic milieu, and always seeking new variations on previous novels with similar settings. I certainly did not intend to write a ‘campus trilogy’ linked by common characters and a fictional Midlands university – it just happened, as a consequence of three quite distinct sources of inspiration.
In January 1969 I took six months leave of absence from my lectureship at Birmingham University to be a visiting Associate Professor at the University of California in Berkeley, taking my wife Mary and three young children with me. We had spent an idyllic summer in San Francisco, just across the Bay Bridge from Berkeley, in 1965, when I was on a Harkness Fellowship, but since then the ideological climate on campuses across Europe and America had changed dramatically. The student revolution, inspired by les événements of May 1968 in Paris, was in full spate. Birmingham University experienced a relatively mild manifestation in the autumn term of that year, though the occupation of administration buildings by militant students traumatised many of my senior colleagues. In Berkeley I found something much more like a real revolution in progress, driven by opposition to the Vietnam war and the hippy counter-culture of Flower Power, of which San Francisco was the fountainhead.
While I was there the struggle became focused on the effort to turn a piece of University property into a People’s Park. The authorities responded with repressive law enforcement. There were violent confrontations between demonstrators and police, tear gas was sprayed on to the campus from helicopters, and the National Guard was called out. People were hurt, and sometimes jailed, but the analogies that were drawn with the contemporaneous occupation of Prague by Russian tanks were wide of the mark. Fundamental political liberties were not at stake, and there was a carnivalesque quality about much of the protest. It was a cultural and generational conflict, which I observed with keen but semidetached interest, like a war correspondent. At the same time, as I performed my teaching duties, I was intrigued and amused by the contrasts between American and British academic life – the competitiveness and professionalism of the former making the latter seem by comparison humane but amateurish. I promised myself that when I got home I would use all this experience to write a novel – a comic one, as campus novels tend to be, exploring the gap between the high ideals of academic institutions and the human flaws and follies of their members.
In recent years, however, several novels had been published by youngish British writers making use of their experience of visiting American universities, including Stepping Westward, by my friend and former Birmingham colleague, Malcolm Bradbury. I was conscious that my treatment of the subject would need some new, extra dimension. Pondering this problem, it occurred to me that as far as I knew, no novel had been written about an American academic spending time in a British university, though this was not uncommon in those days, and was usually brought about by some kind of exchange scheme between two institutions. Bingo! That was the moment when the cartoonist’s light bulb of inspiration lit up inside my head. Suppose I had not one academic central character but two, one British and one American, exchanging posts for six months, against the background of two campuses in revolt, and my narrative cut back and forth between them, following their fortunes, which would become increasingly entwined as they got to know each other’s families. They might even come to exchange wives as well as jobs …
This scenario required two protagonists who were typical of their respective national and professional environments. I had no difficulty in creating Philip Swallow, who, apart from his physical appearance and dearth of publications, has a good deal of myself in him. For Morris Zapp I drew on a great many Jewish academics I had encountered on my two visits to the USA, and one in particular, a friend who fortunately revels in the portrait and in fact rather exaggerates the resemblance to himself. The verbal energy and caustic wit of Morris and his wife Désirée also owe something to Jewish-American novelists and short-story writers I admired. One of the pleasures of writing Changing Places was the opportunity to extend my usual stylistic range in this way, savouring differences between two varieties of English by bringing them into conjunction, and sometimes collision. I am shamefully incompetent in foreign languages, but I believe I have a pretty good ear for American usage.
I needed to find names for my two geographical locations which would evoke the places that had inspired them, but were sufficiently playful to deter a literal-minded identification of the fictional institutions with real ones: ‘Esseph’, ‘Euphoric State’, ‘Rummidge’, etc. With these locations established, and the characters in place, the story developed almost of its own accord, each event or scene in one country generating its counterpart in the other. The characteristic features of life (not just academic life, but social, sexual and cultural life) in each country were made amusing by being observed through eyes unused to them – a device known in the lit crit trade as ‘defamiliarisation’. When I was well into the novel I feared the symmetry of the plot might come to seem a little mechanical and predictable, so I loosened up the narrative method, writing the later chapters in different styles of discourse – letters, quotations from published documents, embedded retrospective narrative sequences, and finally a film script. Many of the documents were authentic press cuttings and fliers I collected while I was in Berkeley. I especially cherish the comment by a Californian eight-year-old: ‘The police are just ruining their lives by being police, they’re also keeping themselves from being a person.’ As I approached the end of the novel I found that I didn’t want to resolve the ‘long-distance wife-swapping’ plot in a way that would favour any of the possible life choices it entailed. The conventions of film narrative provided a convenient solution.
The differences between Britain and America which generate much of the comedy are no longer as striking today as they were in 1969; in some cases they have disappeared altogether. In many ways British higher education has become more like the American model: we have adopted the modular course system, small-group tutorial teaching has virtually disappeared, staff must publish or perish, and universities are run like businesses. The contrasts between everyday life on each side of the Atlantic have also become less marked. In Britain we have long taken for granted many of the material amenities, like central heating and big fridge-freezers, which were once enviously associated with American affluence; and the speed and cheapness of modern communications (air travel, TV, the internet, etc.) have created an almost homogenous transatlantic culture. Changing Places, in short, is now something of a period piece, but I hope still an entertaining one.
It was my fifth novel, and for me what publishers call the ‘breakthrough book’, yet it did not have an easy progress to publication. It was turned down by the publisher who had an option on it and by two others, before Tom Rosenthal took it for Secker & Warburg on condition that I cut it by fifteen thousand words. (I agreed on considerably fewer with my sympathetic editor, but it was good advice.) Published in January 1975, some considerable time after I wrote it, the novel received a unanimously good press, was awarded two prizes, and has never been out of print for more than a few weeks. Since its structure is based on the cinematic ‘cut’ from one place to another, it was an obvious candidate for adaptation to that medium. The film rights were quickly sold to a British producer, who had had one success which unfortunately he was unable to replicate. With a script written by Peter Nichols, he tried for many years to put together a dream cast – John Cleese as Philip Swallow, Walter Matthau as Morris Zapp, Shirley MacLaine as Désirée – but he never managed to get them all together in the same frame; and as the rights were sold in perpetuity (which happened in those days) no one else has been able to make a movie. It is one of those might-have-beens that occur in most writers’ lives, and recur occasionally in wistful retrospect. But otherwise I feel only gratitude for the good fortune of this novel.
From 1970 onwards, the educational needs of our children made it impracticable to live abroad for any length of time, but I continued to travel on academic business, at first within Europe, and then further afield. The occasion might be a British Council lecture tour of universities or more often addressing an international conference on some aspect of literary studies in which I had an interest. It seemed a good way to see the world, with one’s expenses paid and hospitality provided in return for giving a few lectures or delivering a paper. In the last days of 1978 I was invited to speak at the mother of all conferences, the annual convention of the Modern Language Association of America. The huge scale and frenetic pace of this event astonished me. Ten thousand academics were crammed into two skyscraper hotels in mid-Manhattan for three days, listening to and participating in discussions of subjects that ranged from ‘Old English Riddles’ to ‘Lesbian-Feminist Teaching and Learning’, with 30 sessions in progress simultaneously from 8.30 in the morning to 10.15 at night.
And that was only one level of conference activity. It was above all a place to meet people, old friends and old enemies, people whom you knew previously only from their publications, young academics in search of a job, and senior ones with vacancies to fill. And it was obvious that other, more intimate kinds of meeting were being arranged. A British friend of mine was approached after his talk by an attractive woman who invited him to spend the night with her. ‘People only come to this circus to get laid,’ she assured him as he struggled politely to excuse himself. She was wrong, of course, but not entirely wrong. The combination of common professional interests and erotic opportunity makes the conference a likely place for academics off the domestic leash to form new, interesting relationships, and therefore a setting full of fictional possibilities. (My wife trusted me when I was away on these trips, but well-travelled colleagues sometimes complained that their spouses regarded them suspiciously after reading Small World.)
The idea of writing a novel about international conferenzlopers (as the Dutch call them) didn’t occur to me until the following June, when I attended the 7th International James Joyce Symposium, held that year in Zurich, a city where Joyce himself lived for some years and wrote part of his novel Ulysses. Soon after checking into my hotel I walked to the first plenary event of the conference. I soon realized that all the other people moving in the same direction were fellow academics and, as we clustered more closely together and squinted at each other’s lapel badges, that I knew many of them by repute if not personally, and they knew me. Later, in the James Joyce Pub, an authentic Dublin bar dismantled and lovingly reconstructed on Pelikanstrasse, there were more greetings and introductions as draught Guinness was quaffed in the great writer’s honour. From Zurich I flew directly to Israel to take part in another conference on ‘Poetics of Fiction and the Theory of Narrative’, where the same experience was repeated – on a smaller scale, for it was a smaller, more select gathering of scholars – but in a setting that provided more piquant contrasts in the alternation of competitive intellectual debate with episodes of hedonistic tourism. Several of the other participants had also been at the Zurich symposium. In the 1960s Marshall McLuhan observed that the speed and ease of modern communications had turned the world into a ‘global village’. It dawned on me that they had also created a global campus, to which it seemed I now belonged.
Two years, and several conferences, later, I prepared to write a novel about this phenomenon, set in 1979. I decided at an early stage that the characters would include Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, and their wives, whose fortunes I had left conveniently indeterminate at the end of Changing Places. There would be a young hero and heroine who would be novices in the glamorous world of academic travel, and a host of other characters of diverse nationalities. But what could provide the structural principle of the novel, comparable to the exchange-scheme in the earlier one?
Before I start writing a new work of fiction I dedicate a notebook to the project in which I jot down ideas, character sketches, draft synopses, possible situations, jokes, and memos to myself, and looking through my Small World notebook I find very early on this remark: ‘The main problem is to find some plot mechanism that will bring together a large number of varied academic types from different countries, and involve them in meeting each other frequently in different places and in different combinations, and have continuous narrative interest.’ It was a problem which I was unable to solve for some time. Thirty pages later in the notebook there is a somewhat desperate cry: ‘What could provide the basis for a story?’ And just below that, ‘Could some myth serve, as in Ulysses?’ (I was thinking of the way Joyce used the story of Homer’s Odyssey as a template to give shape to the detailed rendering of a single day in the lives of several modern Dubliners.) And below that: ‘E.g., the Grail legend – involves a lot of different characters and long journeys.’
The Grail legend – the quest for the cup which Jesus used at the Last Supper – is at the heart of the myth of King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table. I thought of it at that moment because I had just seen Excalibur, John Boorman’s slightly over-the-top but highly enjoyable movie treatment of this material, and been reminded what a wonderfully gripping narrative it is. I saw an analogy, comic and ironic, between modern academics jetting round the world to meet and compete with each other for fame and love in various exotic settings, and the knights of chivalric romance doing the same thing in a more elevated style, assisted, or hindered, by poetic licence and magic. The Grail sought by the modern knights might be a Chair of Literary Criticism endowed by UNESCO, with an enormous salary and negligible duties. The volatile state of contemporary literary studies, with various methodologies (structuralist, deconstructionist, Marxist, feminist, psychoanalytical, etc.) challenging traditional scholarship and each other, would generate rivalry and conflict. I also thought of T. S. Eliot’s great poem, The Waste Land, and its use of the Grail legend as interpreted by the folklorist Jessie Weston, who saw it as a displaced and sublimated version of an older pagan myth of a Fisher King with a parched, infertile kingdom. I saw connections here with various kinds of sterility afflicting modern writers and literary intellectuals. There might be an elderly, immensely distinguished, unhappily impotent professor called Arthur Kingfisher somewhere in the story …
Small World is packed with literary echoes and allusions: there is scarcely a character or event that does not have its analogue in medieval and renaissance literature. But readers who haven’t studied that subject to university level should not be deterred, for essential information about it is integrated into the text. Miss Sybil Maiden, for instance, is on hand to interpret the Grail legend. The Heathrow check-in girl, Cheryl Summerbee, is eager to explain the difference between the Mills & Boon genre of ‘romance’, from which she has weaned herself, and the traditional kind: ‘Real romance is full of coincidence and surprises and marvels, and has lots of characters who are lost and enchanted or wandering about looking for each other, or for the Grail, or something like that. Of course, they’re often in love too.’
Explicitly invoking the model of traditional romance licensed me to contrive all kinds of improbable narrative twists and turns and coincidences which would be out of place in a realistic novel (see the second epigraph, from Nathaniel Hawthorne), but which were essential to contain my numerous characters and their movements around the globe in a unified narrative. The novel is, however, also rooted in modern reality. There really is, for instance, an underground Chapel of St George, with a low curved roof like the upper cabin of a Boeing 747, at Heathrow Airport, and a noticeboard at the back with desperate prayers and pleas pinned to it. What a gift to my purposes that was! I had visited almost all the places described in the book, and in some cases had similar experiences there to those of my characters. Like my hero, Persse McGarrigle, I nearly sank with a boatload of Irish literature students when we were overtaken by a squall on our way to the Lake Isle of Innisfree. Like him I took shelter from the rain in a bar in Tokyo without ever having heard the word karaoke or knowing what it was (very few people in the West did in 1982) and found myself, after much confused explanation and a few beers, singing ‘Hey Jude’ to an appreciative audience of Japanese businessmen. Later, alone in my hotel bed, I laughed aloud at the memory and thought to myself: ‘this has to go into the novel.’
Small World was set explicitly in 1979, when I conceived the global campus as a subject for fiction. It was also the year when the Conservative party won a general election and Mrs Thatcher became Prime Minister. By 1984, when my novel was published, her government’s policies had made a decisive impact on British economic and social life, including higher education. Universities had their funding drastically cut, were obliged to freeze new appointments, and exhorted to run themselves like businesses. Some of my colleagues, and a few reviewers with a foot in the academic world, thought it was an inopportune moment to publish a comic novel about academics swanning around the world on generous grants to attend conferences which seemed to involve as much partying as conferring: it didn’t give a positive image of university life for the times. I was unrepentant: my novel was, I believed, faithful in its carnivalesque way to academic culture at the time when it was set; it was international, not parochially British in scope; and in any case novelists are not in the business of PR. However, I understood the reaction, and it may have had some influence on my next book, which, without renouncing comedy, took a more serious look at the state of the nation and the place of universities in it.
One effect of Thatcherite free-market economics, it seemed to me, was to put the concept of Work in a new light. The shake-out of uncompetitive British businesses created widespread unemployment, not least in the West Midlands, and university students could no longer count on getting jobs when they graduated. Our brightest ones, I observed, were not staying on to do research because the prospects of an academic career were bleak, and many of them were going into financial services, which were booming. Fewer people were in work than before, but they were required to work harder than ever before. University teachers, at least in the humanities, had never seen their work as having any connection with commerce, or indeed as ‘work’ in the everyday sense of the word, but as a vocation. They were unhappy with the new enterprise ethos, but ill-equipped to resist it.
I began to think of a novel about a businessman, the managing director of some manufacturing company, who had lived only for his work, but suddenly lost his job when the firm collapsed or was taken over, and was unable to find another equivalent one. Suddenly bereft of power and status, his occupation gone, he would fall into depression, then, through getting involved with a woman on the Arts side of his local university, he would begin to re-evaluate the concept of work and its place in his life. Before I could develop this vague idea any further, I needed to know what kind of work he would have done before he was made redundant. Although I had lived in Birmingham for some twenty-five years, I knew very little of that side of its life, so I approached a friend, the husband of a mature student I had taught in the 1970s, who was managing director of an engineering firm, and asked if there was any way I could spend some time observing his working routine. ‘Of course,’ he said. ‘You could shadow me.’ Shadowing, following someone around as they worked, was, I gathered, a common practice in industry – used, for instance, to introduce potential recruits to the operations of a company. But what pretext could I use?
It so happened that the year which had just begun, 1986, had been designated Industry Year in the UK, with the aim of ‘bringing about a change of understanding and attitudes’ to this sector of national life, and a number of documents were circulating at Birmingham University announcing various initiatives to strengthen its ties with local industry. I was by this time a half-time professor, and the spring term of 1986 was my term ‘off’. My friend and I concocted a story that I was on sabbatical leave, doing my bit for Industry Year by learning about career opportunities for arts graduates in this area. I spent a couple of weeks, and occasional days after that, shadowing my friend in his professional activities, attending meetings, inspecting the workshops, visiting potential customers and other factories. Only once did someone identify me as a writer, and he kept a discreet silence; otherwise nobody raised an eyebrow at my presence.
I found the experience absolutely fascinating and highly educative. Literary studies do not encourage a sympathetic interest in commerce and industry, and much classic nineteenth and twentieth century literature is explicitly hostile to the Industrial Revolution and its social consequences. In some ways my experience as a shadow confirmed these prejudices. I was appalled by the soul-destroying, repetitive nature of much factory work and the squalid and sometimes dangerous conditions in which it is carried out. But I also recognized that many managers and skilled operatives had a commitment to achieving excellence in their occupations that was admirable. Furthermore the whole experience of mixing with people constantly exercised with questions of cost and profit brought home to me a truth that academics and literary intellectuals tend to ignore: that high culture depends ultimately on the wealth created by trade.
Very quickly I realized that the cover story devised for my research was a marvellous foundation for a fictional plot, and it displaced the somewhat sentimental idea I had started with. It resembled the exchange scheme in Changing Places – my imagination seems drawn to binary structures which bring contrasting milieux, cultures, and characters into contact and conflict. Instead of a single central character and a single point of view, I would have two: a polytechnic-educated, down-to-earth MD struggling to keep a foundry and engineering company in the black, and an academic from the local university who was reluctantly obliged to shadow him for one day a week as an Industry Year exercise. It would raise the stakes, and increase the fun, of their forced collaboration if the shadow were a woman, and an intellectual of a kind with whom Vic Wilcox (as I called my MD) would have little sympathy. Accordingly I created Robyn Penrose, a young left-wing, feminist literary theorist and specialist in the Victorian ‘industrial novel’, who has never been inside a factory in her life until she turns up in Vic Wilcox’s office one day to his consternation and dismay (he has been expecting a man called ’Robin’). They are two people who have absolutely nothing in common except a dedication to their work – work of two totally different kinds – and an underlying anxiety that they might soon be deprived of it.
The early Victorian ‘industrial novels’, like Disraeli’s Sybil, Elizabeth Gaskell’s North and South, and Dickens’ Hard Times, were sometimes called ‘Condition of England’ novels in their own day, since they were responses to a period of great social and political tension, not unlike the 1980s. As Robyn Penrose explains in her lecture in Chapter 3 of my novel, in the 1840s there was widespread unemployment and poverty, especially in the industrial cities of the Midlands and the North, provoking strikes, lockouts, and violent demonstrations. Although Robyn is dismissive of the Victorian novelists’ attempts to reconcile the conflicting class interests of their time, she does, as a result of the Shadow Scheme, to some extent re-enact the experience of their heroines, especially Mrs Gaskell’s Margaret Hale, and acquires a more informed and nuanced view of the relations between high culture and commerce – as does Vic, coming from the opposite direction ideologically. The typical Victorian narrative resolution of the initial antagonism between them – love and marriage – was for several reasons out of the question, but there is a romantic-sexual strand to the story which allowed me to reverse the basic plot device at a late stage and send Vic to shadow Robyn at the University. His participation in a tutorial on Tennyson’s poetry is a scene which I particularly enjoyed writing.
‘Rummidge’ offered itself as the obvious setting for this novel, but not without attendant problems. As portrayed in Changing Places and Small World¸ it is a comic caricature of Birmingham, drawing, as the authorial note to the latter book admits, on popular prejudices about that city, but not corresponding exactly to it. Nice Work is a more realistic novel, which required a more truthful and fine-grained evocation of its setting. My colleagues at Birmingham, confident of the high reputation of the University and its English Department, had mostly reacted to the two comic novels with good humoured tolerance, but they would look more closely and critically at a realistic portrait of Rummidge University. I was beginning to feel that the distinction I had always tried to maintain between my novel-writing self and my professional academic persona was becoming increasingly difficult to preserve, and it was with considerable relief that I was able to take early retirement from my professorial post and become a full-time writer before Nice Work was published in 1988.
In the event the novel was well received by readers on both sides of the social and cultural divide it described, and my former colleagues seemed unpeturbed. But when I adapted the novel as a TV drama serial for the BBC, and the producer arranged to film the relevant scenes on the Birmingham University campus, some voices were raised in Senate doubting the wisdom of inviting confusion of fiction with fact, and if I had still been a member I would have agreed with them. The University administration however believed the TV drama would be good publicity for the institution (an opinion borne out by subsequent market research) and the filming went ahead. Thus I had the experience of seeing many scenes which I had imagined acted out in the real locations which had inspired them. One Sunday morning in March 1989, for instance, I walked from my house to the main entrance of the University and there, like a dream or hallucination, was a traffic jam I had invented three years earlier, caused by placard-waving pickets of the Association of University Teachers protesting against higher education cuts, with Robyn Penrose (played by Hayden Gwynne) handing out leaflets to the stalled drivers, and Vic Wilcox (Warren Clarke) glowering at her from behind the wheel of his Jaguar. As I write this, there is another crisis in university funding, provoking protests and demonstrations by staff and students, and so the novel has acquired a new topicality.
As for my readers in commerce and industry, both locally and nationally, their reaction was wholly positive. They were, I think, delighted to read a literary novel that, for once, was about them and the kind of work they did, and they seemed to think I had portrayed their world accurately – so much so that for some years after publication I was frequently asked to give talks or take part in seminars on business management. I had to explain that everything I knew about business management was in my novel – indeed, rather more, since I had already forgotten some of what I once knew and was preoccupied with researching a quite different subject. Writing Nice Work had shown me what rewards there might be in deliberately exploring experience outside one’s usual sphere, and henceforward my novels would become increasingly dependent on preliminary research.
David Lodge, 2011
For Lenny and Priscilla, Stanley and Adrienne and many
other friends on the West Coast
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.
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. They were protected from the thin, cold air by the pressurized cabins of two Boeing 707s, and from the risk of collision by the prudent arrangement of the international air corridors. Although they had never met, the two men were known to each other by name. They were, in fact, in process of exchanging posts for the next six months, and in an age of more leisurely transportation the intersection of their respective routes might have been marked by some interesting human gesture: had they waved, for example, from the decks of two ocean liners crossing in mid-Atlantic, each man simultaneously focusing a telescope, by chance, on the other, with his free hand; or, more plausibly, a little mime of mutual appraisal might have been played out through the windows of two railway compartments halted side by side at the same station somewhere in Hampshire or the Mid-West, the more self-conscious party relieved to feel himself, at last, moving off, only to discover that it is the other man’s train that is moving first … However, it was not to be. Since the two men were in airplanes, and one was bored with and the other frightened of looking out of the window – since, in any case, the planes were too distant from each other to be mutually visible with the naked eye, the crossing of their paths at the still point of the turning world passed unremarked by anyone other than the narrator of this duplex chronicle.
‘Duplex’, as well as having the general meaning of ‘two-fold’, applies in the jargon of electrical telegraphy to ‘systems in which messages are sent simultaneously in opposite directions’ (OED). Imagine, if you will, that each of these two professors of English Literature (both, as it happens, aged forty) is connected to his native land, place of employment and domestic hearth by an infinitely elastic umbilical cord of emotions, attitudes and values – a cord which stretches and stretches almost to the point of invisibility, but never quite to breaking-point, as he hurtles through the air at 600 miles per hour. Imagine further that, as they pass each other above the polar ice-cap, the pilots of their respective Boeings, in defiance of regulations and technical feasibility, begin to execute a series of playful aerobatics – criss-crossing, diving, soaring and looping, like a pair of mating bluebirds, so as thoroughly to entangle the aforesaid umbilical cords, before proceeding soberly on their way in the approved manner. It follows that when the two men alight in each other’s territory, and go about their business and pleasure, whatever vibrations are passed back by one to his native habitat will be felt by the other, and vice versa, and thus return to the transmitter subtly modified by the response of the other party – may, indeed, return to him along the other party’s cord of communication, which is, after all, anchored in the place where he has just arrived; so that before long the whole system is twanging with vibrations travelling backwards and forwards between Prof A and Prof B, now along this line, now along that, sometimes beginning on one line and terminating on another. It would not be surprising, in other words, if two men changing places for six months should exert a reciprocal influence on each other’s destinies, and actually mirror each other’s experience in certain respects, notwithstanding all the differences that exist between the two environments, and between the characters of the two men and their respective attitudes towards the whole enterprise.
One of these differences we can take in at a glance from our privileged narrative altitude (higher than that of any jet). It is obvious, from his stiff, upright posture, and fulsome gratitude to the stewardess serving him a glass of orange juice, that Philip Swallow, flying westward, is unaccustomed to air travel; while to Morris Zapp, slouched in the seat of his eastbound aircraft, chewing a dead cigar (a hostess has made him extinguish it) and glowering at the meagre portion of ice dissolving in his plastic tumbler of bourbon, the experience of long-distance air travel is tediously familiar.
Philip Swallow has, in fact, flown before; but so seldom, and at such long intervals, that on each occasion he suffers the same trauma, an alternating current of fear and reassurance that charges and relaxes his system in a persistent and exhausting rhythm. While he is on the ground, preparing for his journey, he thinks of flying with exhilaration – soaring up, up and away into the blue empyrean, cradled in aircraft that seem, from a distance, effortlessly at home in that element, as though sculpted from the sky itself. This confidence begins to fade a little when he arrives at the airport and winces at the shrill screaming of jet engines. In the sky the planes look very small. On the runways they look very big. Therefore close up they should look even bigger – but in fact they don’t. His own plane, for instance, just outside the window of the assembly lounge, doesn’t look quite big enough for all the people who are going to get into it. This impression is confirmed when he passes through the tunnel into the cabin of the aircraft, a cramped tube full of writhing limbs. But when he, and the other passengers, are seated, well-being returns. The seats are so remarkably comfortable that one feels quite content to stay put, but it is reassuring that the aisle is free should one wish to walk up it. There is soothing music playing. The lighting is restful. A stewardess offers him the morning paper. His baggage is safely stowed away in the plane somewhere, or if it is not, that isn’t his fault, which is the main thing. Flying is, after all, the only way to travel.
But as the plane taxis to the runway, he makes the mistake of looking out of the window at the wings bouncing gently up and down. The panels and rivets are almost painfully visible, the painted markings weathered, there are streaks of soot on the engine cowlings. It is borne in upon him that he is, after all, entrusting his life to a machine, the work of human hands, fallible and subject to decay. And so it goes on, even after the plane has climbed safely into the sky: periods of confidence and pleasure punctuated by spasms of panic and emptiness.
The sang-froid of his fellow passengers is a constant source of wonderment to him, and he observes their deportment carefully. Flying for Philip Swallow is essentially a dramatic performance, and he approaches it like a game amateur actor determined to hold his own in the company of word-perfect professionals. To speak the truth, he approaches most of life’s challenges in the same spirit. He is a mimetic man: unconfident, eager to please, infinitely suggestible.
It would be natural, but incorrect, to assume that Morris Zapp has suffered no such qualms on his flight. A seasoned veteran of the domestic airways, having flown over most of the states in the Union in his time, bound for conferences, lecture dates and assignations, it has not escaped his notice that airplanes occasionally crash. Being innately mistrustful of the universe and its guiding spirit, which he sometimes refers to as Improvidence (‘How can you attribute that,’ he will ask, gesturing at the star-spangled night sky over the Pacific, ‘to something called Providence? Just look at the waste!’), he seldom enters an aircraft without wondering with one part of his busy brain whether he is about to feature in Air Disaster of the Week on the nation’s TV networks. Normally such morbid thoughts visit him only at the beginning and end of a flight, for he has read somewhere that eighty per cent of all aircraft accidents occur at either take-off or landing – a statistic that did not surprise him, having been stacked on many occasions for an hour or more over Esseph airport, fifty planes circling in the air, fifty more taking off at ninety-second intervals, the whole juggling act controlled by a computer, so that it only needed a fuse to blow and the sky would look like airline competition had finally broken out into open war, the companies hiring retired kamikaze pilots to destroy each other’s hardware in the sky, TWA’s Boeings ramming Pan Am’s, American Airlines’ DC 8s busting United’s right out of their Friendly Skies (hah!), rival shuttle services colliding head-on, the clouds raining down wings, fuselages, engines, passengers, chemical toilets, hostesses, menu cards and plastic cutlery (Morris Zapp had an apocalyptic imagination on occasion, as who has not in America these days?) in a definitive act of industrial pollution.
By taking the non-stop polar flight to London, in preference to the two-stage journey via New York, Zapp reckons that he has reduced his chances of being caught in such an Armageddon by fifty per cent. But weighing against this comforting thought is the fact that he is travelling on a charter flight, and chartered aircraft (he has also read) are several times more likely to crash than planes on scheduled flights, being, he infers, machines long past their prime, bought as scrap from the big airlines by cheapjack operators and sold again and again to even cheaper jacks (this plane, for instance, belonged to a company called Orbis; the phoney Latin name inspired no confidence and he wouldn’t mind betting that an ultra-violet photograph would reveal a palimpsest of fourteen different airline insignia under its fresh paint) flown by pilots long gone over the hill, alcoholics and schizoids, shaky-fingered victims of emergency landings, ice-storms and hijackings by crazy Arabs and homesick Cubans wielding sticks of dynamite and dime-store pistols. Furthermore, this is his first flight over water (yes, Morris Zapp has never before left the protection of the North American landmass, a proud record unique among the faculty of his university) and he cannot swim. The unfamiliar ritual of instruction, at the commencement of the flight, in the use of inflatable lifejackets, unsettled him. That canvas and rubber contraption was a fetishist’s dream, but he had as much chance of getting into it in an emergency as into the girdle of the hostess giving the demonstration. Furthermore, exploratory gropings failed to locate a lifejacket where it was supposed to be, under his seat. Only his reluctance to strike an undignified pose before a blonde with outsize spectacles in the next seat had dissuaded him from getting down on hands and knees to make a thorough check. He contented himself with allowing his long, gorilla-like arms to hang loosely over the edge of his seat, fingers brushing the underside unobtrusively in the style used for parking gum or nosepickings. Once, at full stretch, he found something that felt promising, but it proved to be one of his neighbour’s legs, and was indignantly withdrawn. He turned towards her, not to apologize (Morris Zapp never apologized) but to give her the famous Zapp Stare, guaranteed to stop any human creature, from University Presidents to Black Panthers, dead in his tracks at a range of twenty yards, only to be confronted with an impenetrable curtain of blonde hair.
Eventually he abandons the quest for the lifejacket, reflecting that the sea under his ass at the moment is frozen solid anyway, not that that is a reassuring thought. No, this is not the happiest of flights for Morris J. Zapp (‘Jehovah’, he would murmur out of the side of his mouth to girls who inquired about his middle name, it never failed; all women longed to be screwed by a god, it was the source of all religion – ‘Just look at the myths, Leda and the Swan, Isis and Osiris, Mary and the Holy Ghost’ – thus spake Zapp in his graduate seminar, pinning a brace of restive nuns to their seats with the Stare). There is something funny, he tells himself, about this plane – not just the implausible Latin name of the airline, the missing lifejacket, the billions of tons of ice underneath him and the minuscule cube melting in the bourbon before him – something else there is, something he hasn’t figured out yet. While Morris Zapp is working on this problem, we shall take time out to explain something of the circumstances that have brought him and Philip Swallow into the polar skies at the same indeterminate (for everybody’s watch is wrong by now) hour.
Between the State University of Euphoria (colloquially known as Euphoric State) and the University of Rummidge, there has long existed a scheme for the exchange of visiting teachers in the second half of each academic year. How two universities so different in character and so widely separated in space should be linked in this way is simply explained. It happened that the architects of both campuses independently hit upon the same idea for the chief feature of their designs, namely, a replica of the leaning Tower of Pisa, built of white stone and twice the original size at Euphoric State and of red brick and to scale at Rummidge, but restored to the perpendicular in both instances. The exchange scheme was set up to mark this coincidence.
Under the original agreement, each visitor drew the salary to which he was entitled by rank and seniority on the scale of the host institution, but as no American could survive for more than a few days on the monthly stipend paid by Rummidge, Euphoric State made up the difference for its own faculty, while paying its British visitors a salary beyond their wildest dreams and bestowing upon them indiscriminately the title of Visiting Professor. It was not only in these terms that the arrangement tended to favour the British participants. Euphoria, that small but populous state on the Western seaboard of America, situated between Northern and Southern California, with its mountains, lakes and rivers, its redwood forests, its blond beaches and its incomparable Bay, across which the State University at Plotinus faces the glittering, glamorous city of Esseph – Euphoria is considered by many cosmopolitan experts to be one of the most agreeable environments in the world. Not even its City Fathers would claim as much for Rummidge, a large, graceless industrial city sprawled over the English Midlands at the intersection of three motorways, twenty-six railway lines and half-a-dozen stagnant canals.
Then again, Euphoric State had, by a ruthless exploitation of its wealth, built itself up into one of America’s major universities, buying the most distinguished scholars it could find and retaining their loyalty by the lavish provision of laboratories, libraries, research grants and handsome, long-legged secretaries. By this year of 1969, Euphoric State had perhaps reached its peak as a centre of learning, and was already in the process of decline – due partly to the accelerating tempo of disruption by student militants, and partly to the counter-pressures exerted by the right-wing Governor of the State, Ronald Duck, a former movie-actor. But such was the quality of the university’s senior staff, and the magnitude of its accumulated resources, that it would be many years before its standing was seriously undermined. Euphoric State, in short, was still a name to conjure with in the senior common rooms of the world. Rummidge, on the other hand, had never been an institution of more than middling size and reputation, and it had lately suffered the mortifying fate of most English universities of its type (civic redbrick): having competed strenuously for fifty years with two universities chiefly valued for being old, it was, at the moment of drawing level, rudely overtaken in popularity and prestige by a batch of universities chiefly valued for being new. Its mood was therefore disgruntled and discouraged, rather as would be the mood of the middle class in a society that had never had a bourgeois revolution, but had passed directly from aristocratic to proletarian control.