The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up and Other Stories Read online

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Lodge

  Title Page

  Foreword

  The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up

  The Miser

  My First Job

  Where the Climate’s Sultry

  Hotel des Boobs

  Pastoral

  A Wedding to Remember

  My Last Missis

  Afterword

  For The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up – Hommage to David Lodge by Philippine Hamen

  Copyright

  About the Book

  A nameless man who has fallen out of love with life refuses to get out of bed, with unexpected consequences. A sociologist recalls how he learned his first and formative lesson about the oppressive power of capitalism selling newspapers and magazines up and down the platforms of Waterloo station. Some years before the era of the Pill and the Permissive Society, four university friends travel to the Mediterranean for their first holiday together, where the climate is sultry and sex is one everyone’s mind. And a strong-willed young woman defies adverse circumstances to pursue the perfect wedding at all costs.

  These are some of the characters that populate David Lodge’s shrewd, funny and delightfully entertaining short stories, collected here for the very first time. What prompted their publication in this form is a short story in itself, told by the author in his Foreword.

  About the Author

  David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places (1975), for which he was awarded the Hawthornden Prize, How Far Can You Go? (1980), which was Whitbread Book of the Year, Small World (1984), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, Nice Work (1988), which won the Sunday Express Book of the Year Award, Thinks . . . (2001), Author, Author (2004), Deaf Sentence (2008) and, most recently, A Man of Parts (2011). He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction (1992), Consciousness and the Novel (2002) and Lives in Writing (2014). In 2015 he published Quite a Good Time to Be Born: A Memoir: 1935–1975. His works have been translated into more than thirty languages. David Lodge is Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham University and continues to live in that city. He is a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature, was awarded a CBE for services to literature and is also a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

  ALSO BY DAVID LODGE

  Fiction

  The Picturegoers

  Ginger, You’re Barmy

  The British Museum is Falling Down

  Out of the Shelter

  Changing Places

  How Far Can You Go?

  Small World

  Nice Work

  Paradise News

  Therapy

  Home Truths

  Thinks . . .

  Author, Author

  Deaf Sentence

  A Man of Parts

  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

  Autobiography

  Quite a Good Time to Be Born

  Foreword

  For a fairly short book, this one has a long and complicated – but I hope interesting – history. In the 1990s my novels were published in German translations by the Zurich-based publishing house Haffmans Verlag. The proprietor, Gerd Haffman, an ebullient, enthusiastic publisher, asked me if I had written any short stories which he could publish as a collection. I looked through my files and told him that there were only six which I thought worthy of being reprinted, obviously insufficient to fill a book. But Haffmans produced many books in attractive small formats, and in 1995 Gerd published my half-dozen tales as Sommergeschichten – Wintermärchen (Summer Stories – Winter’s Tales), a title I suggested because of their seasonal settings. Some other European publishers of my fiction then asked if they could do the same, and in due course translations in similar formats appeared in Poland, Portugal, Italy and France. But both Bompiani in Italy and Rivages in France preferred to use the title of the first and earliest story for the book. I realised that The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up and Other Stories was a more intriguing name for it.

  An obvious difference between the novel and the short story is that the reader usually begins a story intending to finish it at a single sitting, whereas one reads a novel in a much more leisurely and irregular fashion, picking it up and putting it down as opportunity or inclination dictate. In a sense, we are always eager to get to the end of a short story, but we may well be sorry to reach the end of a much-loved novel. Whereas the meaning of a novel has something of the openness and multiplicity of life itself, the short story usually has a single ‘point’ to make, fully revealed to us at its ending, which may take the form of a twist in the plot, the solution of a mystery, or a moment of recognition and enhanced awareness – what James Joyce called, borrowing the language of religion, an ‘epiphany’.

  Most novelists cut their authorial teeth on the short story, for obvious practical reasons, and I was no exception; but I also managed to complete an entire novel at the age of eighteen. It was unpublishable, but it indicated a bias in favour of the long narrative. When Gerd Haffman published my six stories I vaguely hoped that eventually I might write enough new ones to make up a viable collection for the English language market, but the ideas I got for fiction always seemed to invite the expansive development of the novel form. So when a few years later I received an offer to publish the six stories in English in a limited edition of a hundred copies, I was glad to accept. It meant I would have a few ‘Author’s copies’ to keep as a permanent record of the stories without jeopardising the possibility of publishing them as part of a larger collection in the future. This proposal came from Tom Rosenthal, who had changed my fortunes as a novelist when, as Managing Director of Secker & Warburg, he published Changing Places very successfully in 1975, after three other publishers had turned it down. Tom retired from full-time commercial publishing in 1998, but started a small private enterprise at about the same time called the Bridgewater Press, which produced covetable limited editions of books for collectors. His handsome edition of The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up and Other Stories, printed on Archival Parchment paper and bound in Ratchford Atlantic cloth or (for an extra premium) quarter Library Calf, was published in 1998.

  Cut to the 5th of June 2015, when I received an email letter forwarded by Catherine Cho, assistant to my agent, Jonny Geller, at Curtis Brown.

  From: philippine hamen

  Sent: 28 May 2015 23:57

  To: Geller Office

  Subject: Hommage to Mr Lodge

  Dear Mr Geller,

  I have a special request here concerning David Lodge.

  It is a surprise for him so please can we keep it as such?

  I am a fervent lector of David Lodge, and I am a furniture designer-maker; actually this vocation appeared to me after I read the short story ‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up’, which gave me the vision of a special, hybrid piece of furniture that would allow the narrator to virtually stay in bed while being able to still work from the structure I came up with, at equi-distance between a desk and a lounger.

  Because this ‘visio
n’ decided that I would study furniture, and because it is to me one of the most brilliant short stories ever written, I would like to send a finished piece to the address of the author, as a hommage, as a thank you, and as a solution for ‘the man who wouldn’t get up’! It might be a metaphorical tale, but the result of it is a very serious and ergonomically studied piece of furniture, which had quite a lot of success at the Salone di Mobile 2015, Milan.

  Do you think he would be pleased?

  I would need his address.

  I could show you pictures of it and videos if it helps.

  Thank you for your cooperation!

  Kindly, Philippine Hamen

  (I am from France and I study furniture in London, after graduating from Modern Literature in La Sorbonne in 2007).

  Attached to this message were some very striking photos of the lounger-desk displayed at the Milan exhibition. In a follow-up letter Philippine said that it could be dismantled and packed into a box of manageable size, but Catherine told her that the agency could not collude in sending me a large piece of furniture as a surprise present. She asked me what I wanted to do about this unusual offer. After giving the matter considerable thought I replied to Philippine as follows:

  Dear Philippine Hamen,

  My literary agent Jonny Geller’s assistant, Catherine Cho, has sent to me your letter of 28th May, with its extraordinarily generous offer to present me with the beautiful piece of furniture you have constructed, inspired by my short story ‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up’. I think it must be the most original tribute ever paid by a reader to an author. I would, of course, love to see it, and try lying on it. The problem is that there is no room in my house in which it could be placed without displacing a more essential piece of furniture.

  It seems to me that as well as being a piece of furniture your bed-desk is a 3D work of art, and I am not surprised that it caught people’s eyes at the Salone di Mobile. I have been wondering whether I could persuade an art gallery in Birmingham, where I live and am known, to accept the piece as a gift, to exhibit it (perhaps occasionally) and store it safely when it is not on display. Perhaps it could be an installation which viewers could actually lie on, and read through the hole an explanation of why you made the object. From the photos you sent it looks as if you provided some explanatory material in this way when it was displayed in Milan.

  I am by no means confident of success in this project, but I am willing to try if you approve. Possibly viewers could listen through headphones to a recording of me reading the short story ‘The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up’. Unfortunately the story is not available in print in England. The collection of six stories in which you must have read it, L’Homme qui ne voulait plus se lever (Rivages) was not published in the UK except in a small limited edition for collectors, though it has been published in several other foreign countries.

  With best wishes, David Lodge

  Philippine’s response was positive and enthusiastic:

  I was honoured, and actually very happy, to read your email. As a child I was used to see your books on the bedside tables of my parents, as a teenager I started to read you and I still am! ‘L’Homme qui ne voulait plus se lever’ is my favourite short story, and I was very surprised, when I tried to find the English version for the needs of my course, that I was unable to find it anywhere! Anyway, I wanted to thank you because it had a great influence on me and it generated the main furniture project of my academic year!

  I think your idea of storing the piece and exhibiting it in a gallery in Birmingham is great, and being able to listen to your voice reading the story would add a fourth dimension to it. I don’t know any furniture design project which collaborates that actively with literature and I am very excited about it.

  I am aware it is not completely in your hands and that it might not succeed but I am very grateful that you are willing to try.

  Best wishes from London, Philippine

  Thus encouraged, I pursued my idea. The Birmingham gallery I particularly had in mind was the Ikon, a subsidised gallery exhibiting the work of contemporary artists from Britain and all round the world. It occupies a beautifully restored and converted redbrick Victorian school in Brindley Place, part of Birmingham’s central arts and entertainment district, and in addition to its large display rooms the Ikon has a cylindrical tower room where small installations are often shown concurrently with one of the gallery’s main exhibitions. This room, which can accommodate half a dozen or so people at a time, seemed to me the ideal place to exhibit Philippine’s piece. My wife Mary and I are patrons of the gallery and know the Director, Jonathan Watkins well. I thought he would be receptive to my idea, and I was right. He embraced it immediately and his colleagues were equally enthusiastic. I went down to London to meet Philippine at the Cass Faculty of Art and Design, a part of London Metropolitan University situated in Whitechapel, where I recognised her as the same tall, slim young woman in jeans who had demonstrated the use of the lounger-desk in the Milan exhibition photos. In person she quickly impressed me as charming, intelligent and perceptive. I was able to see the lounger-desk, which was being prepared for the college’s summer show, and admired still more its flowing lines, and its combination of different textures and colours – natural wood, dark grey fabric and steel. I lay prone on it, verifying that it was possible to comfortably read an open book placed on the lower level through the aperture in the top level.

  In September Philippine came up to Birmingham to be shown round the Ikon, meet the staff, and have a working lunch with Jonathan and me. He proposed that her creation, eventually entitled For the Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up, should be exhibited in autumn 2016, to coincide with the Birmingham Literary Festival, so that both institutions could benefit from the associated publicity. Although this meant a long delay, it would give Philippine plenty of time to construct a second, more robust version of the lounger-desk. It also gave me time to consider and extend my own input to this mixed-media event.

  My pleasure in the project had from the beginning been qualified by a regret that the story which had inspired Philippine’s creation was not available in English. It was originally published in the Weekend Telegraph magazine in 1966 and had never been reprinted except in the Bridgewater Press limited edition of the six stories, so viewers of the lounger-desk at the Ikon whose interest was aroused in the story which it referenced would not be able to satisfy their curiosity except by going to the British Library or another copyright library. It was agreed that Philippine would write the text of a leaflet which would be available at the Ikon exhibition, describing the genesis of the lounger-desk and quoting briefly from the story, but I hankered after giving interested visitors a fuller acquaintance with the text. For that reason I had suggested a recording of myself reading it which visitors could listen to through headphones, but few would have the patience to listen for the twenty minutes it would take, and there would be other practical difficulties. Jonathan proposed that stapled photocopies of the story be freely distributed in the gallery, but I was not disposed to give my work away like a teacher’s handout. I wondered if perhaps we could produce copies of a decently printed and bound pamphlet containing the story, which could be purchased from the Ikon’s bookshop. When I mentioned this idea to Jonny Geller, he said, ‘A couple of years ago the V&A mounted an exhibition of various artists’ responses to a story by Hari Kunzru called Memory Palace, and they sold a lot of copies of a book about it from their bookshop and online. Why don’t we see if Vintage will reprint the Bridgewater Press edition of your stories, linked to the exhibition at the Ikon?’ I jumped at this proposal, and immediately saw an opportunity, if it succeeded, to include two new stories I had written recently.

  For the Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up

  And so it came to pass. The Vintage editorial team liked the old and new stories, none of which they had seen before, and were attracted by the idea of launching the book from an art exhibition. You hold the product of this unlikely sequence of events in your h
ands. With the addition of the two new stories these eight cover almost the entire span of my life as a published writer of fiction. The first one was written in 1966, the second one at some time in the ’70s, the next three belong to the 1980s, ‘Pastoral’ was written in the early ’90s, and the last two very recently. Some are retrospective in their narrative point of view, reflecting changes in manners and morals in society, and they have been placed in yet another time frame with the passing of the years. Tom Rosenthal asked me to write a short introduction to the Bridgewater Press edition describing how and why I came to write the stories, and I have revised and extended these notes in an Afterword to this edition. Philippine Hamen has added a short account of the creative design process that produced her own unique artefact.

  D.L., 2016

  The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up

  His wife was always the first to get up. As soon as the alarm rang she threw back the bedclothes, swung her legs to the floor and pulled on her dressing gown. Her self-discipline filled him with guilt and admiration.

  ‘Now don’t go lying in bed,’ she said. ‘I’m fed up with having your breakfast spoil.’ He made no reply, feigning sleep. As soon as she had left the room he rolled over into the warm trough that her body had left in the mattress, and stretched luxuriously. It was the most sensually satisfying moment of his day, this stretch into a new, but warm part of the bed. But it was instantly impaired by the consciousness that he would soon have to get up and face the rest of the day.

  He opened one eye. It was still dark, but the street-lamps cast a faint blue illumination into the room. He tested the atmosphere with his breath, and saw it turn to steam. Where one of the curtains was pulled back he could see that ice had formed on the inside of the window. In the course of the morning the ice would melt and the water would roll down to rot the paintwork on the window frame. Some of the water would trickle under the window frame where it would freeze again, jamming the window and warping the wood.