A Rummidge in the Archive

A guest post: Stan Abbott recalls meeting the late David Lodge.

A guest post today, in which STAN ABBOTT recalls a visit to the home of the late David Lodge (who died on New Year’s Day), the author of so-called “campus novels”, among other comic and more serious literary themes…

Before I hand over to Stan I should just say how much I’ve enjoyed the Lodge novels I’ve read: Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, and Out of the Shelter¹. Oops, almost forgot The British Museum Is Falling Down. Lodge strikes me as a great example of how you can be ‘literary’ without being inaccessible or just ‘up yourself’. It seems to me I’ve seen far too few tributes on Substack, or anywhere else for that matter, so with Stan’s help here’s an attempt to redress the balance.

Stan Abbott writes:

The recent death of the author David Lodge had me delving into my creative archive to track down an interview I did with him back in 00s. It was for an inflight magazine I edited at the time and ran like this:

<<The street is unprepossessing: a leafy lane in Edgbaston not two miles from the centre of Birmingham; yes that’s Birmingham and not the parallel entity of Rummidge that, says Lodge, inhabits the same time and space as England’s self-proclaimed Second City, but exists in a similar if separate universe.

Rummidge is the fictional creation of Lodge, who remains among Britain’s most acclaimed and successful contemporary authors – one whose own works may be pored over by students in some future century as he himself has, over the works of Dickens and others, in his role as Professor of English Literature (now Emeritus Professor) at the University of Rummidge, er, Birmingham, rather.

A Londoner by birth and upbringing, he remains, by his own reckoning, one of only a tiny number of novelists to have chosen Birmingham as a setting.

The not so unprepossessing house calls to mind a picture of one designed by Frank Lloyd Wright, with angular forms and large areas of glass. This is good news² for the window cleaner, at work as I arrive and, says Mr Lodge, a “jewel” in an age when reliable (or indeed any) window cleaners are like hens’ teeth. The Lodges are the third occupants of a home erected towards the end of the first of the two “rebirths” or “reinventions” of Birmingham since Lodge first arrived in the city for “a one-year job” in 1960.

I’m curious to learn why he created the fiction of Rummidge, yet we quickly leave campus life at Rummidge-Birmingham and somehow get onto the subject of Lodge’s next novel. It’s a radical departure from the customary genre of tragic-humorous observations on life and relationships, at times lumped together under the unflattering label of campus romps.

In a fortunate accident of timing and opportunity I am the first journalist to be told of this departure. “At the moment you know more about it than my publisher,” adds Lodge as we agree that this part of our conversation will remain for the time being on my hard disc, but for the admission that it is a historical novel, based on the relationship between the real literary figures of Henry James and George du Maurier (Daphne’s granddad).

But back to the boy from Brockley’s arrival in a Birmingham that had yet to sleep off its hangover of post-war austerity… “When I came here it was like travelling back in time. Nightlife consisted of a few Victorian pubs and a few Indian restaurants. Now, on a Friday and Saturday night it’s like a carnival. It’s really changed– I think a lot of cities have changed a lot, but Birmingham started from a pretty low base.

“Obviously I like it or I wouldn’t be here. But I don’t really feel it’s my place, like I feel London is, although I am an adopted Brummy.

“I’ve been very happy in Birmingham and it’s a good place to bring up a family and now my children grandchildren are here. I visit London quite a lot and have a little flat there. Ordinary people are prevented from enjoying the facilities of the city in London. It seemed such a luxury when I came here, to be able to get to work in ten minutes.”

But if such contrasts with 60s London were remarkable, they were as nothing to Lodge’s experience when, in January 1969, he flew to Berkeley, California, to do a six-month stint as a visiting professor. It was this experience that inspired Changing Places, published 1975, in which two professors from England and the USA swap roles.

Lodge, like his hero, Philip Swallow, arrived in the States in what was pretty much another post-war environment – the campus world after the riots of 1968. He found himself intrigued by both the similarities and the contrasts between Berkeley and Birmingham. Bizarrely, the two campuses even boasted almost identical extravagant clock towers. But setting his novel on the two real campuses would cause problems, not least because he was still a university lecturer at Birmingham.

“So, like Thomas Hardy or Arnold Bennett, I constructed a fictional world that bore a resemblance to the real world. I thought up Rummidge for Birmingham and Euphoric State for Berkeley. Every place or street name has equivalence in the real world. I was very careful not to portray anybody, though Maurice Zapp [the American hero who swaps places with Swallow] is real and rather enjoys it. But apart from that I have always been careful not to draw recognisable characters.”

Back in the real world, Lodge notes that only now has Birmingham managed to put the planning wrongs of the 60s to rights. And he seems to have almost a love-hate relationship with the city he’s happy to call home. Small World – the sequel to Changing Places – came out in 1984, but in 1988, Lodge set a different kind of book in Rummidge, leaving the campus for the world of the local engineering industry at the height of the Thatcher years. Lodge worked on a TV adaptation, with Warren Clarke as factory boss Vic Wilcox and Haydn Gwynne as the Rummidge university academic, Robyn Penrose. It helped shape Clarke’s career long before Dalziel and Pascoe.

“Local industry responded very warmly to Nice Work and I got lots of good feedback. The TV version brought me to the attention of a wider public so I think they regard me as an adopted son in a way.”

But industry’s enthusiasm perhaps doesn’t extend across the more ephemeral arts world, as Lodge was to find out. “The city as a whole is not terribly literary in its orientation. They are working people. I was an advisor to the literary festival that was run here, but in the end that just didn’t work.

“There is a lot of ‘culture’ going on – music, theatre and so on – but I think literature is low down the priority list.”

For all that, Lodge was approached by the team that put together the unsuccessful bid to become European Capital of Culture. “I passed some pretty severe criticisms,” he recalls. “In the first draft they mentioned Birmingham airport but not the Birmingham Rep, so I didn’t think the people who did it knew much about culture…”

He’s ambivalent about the ultimate choice of Liverpool to wear that crown in 2008. “For local loyalty I would have gone for Birmingham, but I didn’t think they would win. I think Newcastle would have been a good choice.”

Lodge went back on campus for his most recent novel, Thinks…. And while he set it in the real town of Cheltenham, it was on a fictional campus at the University of Cheltenham. Or so he thought: “There is now a University of Cheltenham and Gloucester. I wanted an isolated campus where my heroine would feel lonely. What I didn’t know was that there was a college of higher education that was destined to become a university.”

In Thinks… Robyn Penrose makes a cameo appearance, but she visits from Birmingham, rather than from Rummidge. Farewell then Rummidge? And long live Birmingham. >>

Afterword

I read Lodge’s Henry James novel, Author, author while on holiday in Greece and enjoyed it immensely, while multiplying severalfold everything I knew about Henry James. However, when that novel first came out, it was to the unexpected accompaniment of not one but two other novels about James. One of these was Colm Tóibín’s The Master and Lodge was perhaps less than generous in his response, being prompted to write a book (The Year of Henry James) about the whole experience that one might say was not universally acclaimed by critics.

That interview with Lodge was part of a series I wrote, called Abbott’s Authors, whose highlights included probably the last interview given by John Fowles prior to his death.

1. I’m a bit bemused that my copy of the last-named is currently AWOL, as it would have made a nice tribute read.

2. Good news… or nice work? I think you might have missed a trick there, Stan.