Writer's Luck Read online

  In the course of time, as structuralism turned into poststructuralism, and then became a hugely inflated field of multidisciplinary academic discourse about culture and society referred to simply as ‘Theory’, I myself became troubled by the obfuscatory jargon it employed – often, it seemed, designed to mystify rather than enlighten the reader, and thus demonstrate the writer’s privileged access to the truth. But criticism cannot do entirely without jargon. To analyse language in use, you need a metalanguage, and it seemed to me in the 1970s that the metalanguage employed by Jakobson and later critics in the structuralist tradition like Tzvetan Todorov, Gérard Genette and Roland Barthes justified itself by its usefulness in answering the questions posed by Gertrude Stein which I used as the epigraph for The Modes of Modern Writing: ‘What does literature do and how does it do it. And what does English literature do and how does it do it. And what ways does it use to do what it does.’ Modes did not pretend to be a book for ‘the general reader’, but it had a long life as such publications go, remaining in print for more than thirty years, and was reissued by Bloomsbury Academic in 2015.

  I spent the summer term of that year, 1977, as Henfield Fellow in Creative Writing at the University of East Anglia, Norwich, taking unpaid leave of absence from Birmingham. Malcolm Bradbury had suggested I apply for this one-term appointment and no doubt exerted his influence in my favour. The Fellowship was associated with the MA programme in Creative Writing which he and Angus Wilson (who then had a part-time post at UEA) had founded in 1970, and Malcolm was now its sole Director.

  When he and I were students in the 1950s, and for most of the 1960s when we were lecturers, there was no degree course in Creative Writing at any British university. Now there are very few universities which do not offer the subject at undergraduate and/or postgraduate level, and very few younger published writers who do not have such a qualification in their CV. The growth of Creative Writing as an academic subject, and its acceptance as a normal way of preparing to become a professional novelist, poet or playwright, is one of the most striking developments in contemporary culture, the effects of which are still difficult to assess. For centuries writers had learned their craft individually, by reading or listening to the work of others, by imitation, adaptation and experiment. Suddenly it seemed natural to do your apprentice work as a member of a group of students under the tuition of a master in whatever form interested you. Why did that happen?

  The expansion of higher education, first in the USA and later in the UK, had something to do with it. In America, where a larger proportion of the 18-plus age group went to college than in Britain, and writers, in an always insecure profession, found teaching on a temporary or permanent basis a congenial ‘day job’, Creative Writing was established as an academic subject much earlier. It is hard to think of any significant American writer of the post-war period who was not at some point a student or teacher of Creative Writing (and often both). The same development occurred much later in Britain because there was a more deep-seated academic resistance to the concept here (as there still is in most Continental European countries) on the grounds that successful literary creation depends on innate personal faculties that cannot be taught and cannot be objectively assessed. They certainly could not be assessed within the structure of the traditional British BA degree by a set of three-hour examinations, and it was only when our universities began to move towards a modular course system that it became feasible to incorporate Creative Writing into the curriculum. An element of intellectual rigour was introduced into the subject by requiring students to give an analytical account of the genesis and composition of their work when submitting it. Creative Writing now justifies its place in the humanities as a discipline which trains the mind like any other subject and does not necessarily have a vocational application. Without being entirely convinced by that claim, I believe that creative writing exercises should have a place in every undergraduate degree course in English, because they enhance students’ critical understanding of the process of literary composition. But a majority of the students who choose Creative Writing as a postgraduate degree or as the major part of an undergraduate degree have literary aspirations of their own.

  The UEA course under Malcolm’s direction gave a crucially important impetus to the phenomenon in Britain, and if it was not quite the first of its kind it was soon the most successful and influential. It thrived because from an early stage in its history it produced graduates who went on to make their mark as published writers. In the first year’s intake there was only one student – but he was Ian McEwan. Kazuo Ishiguro and Rose Tremain soon followed in his footsteps, and a steady stream of other young writers who got their work published soon after graduating. New programmes in Creative Writing sprang up all over the country, but UEA has remained the most coveted place to pursue it, under the direction of other authors following Malcolm’s retirement. Its website currently lists several hundred alumni whose work has been published, including many names well known to readers of contemporary fiction.

  The duties of the Henfield Fellowship were light: to run a writing workshop one evening a week open to candidates from the local community as well as the University, to invite the occasional visiting speaker, and to be available for a few hours each week to talk to individual students. Otherwise the Fellows were free to get on with their own work. There was a modest stipend and free accommodation was provided in a small flat on the campus. It seemed an ideal opportunity to get on with the novel about Catholics I had just started, free from teaching, exam marking and domestic responsibilities. To make the most of it I agreed with Mary that I would spend the whole term on the UEA campus, rather than commuting back and forth, and she generously accepted the extra burden this would entail for her. Indeed she claims she positively encouraged me to do so, knowing what a preoccupied, irritable and unrewarding partner I was when getting a new novel under way. Since our six months in Berkeley in 1969 I had received frequent invitations to be a visiting professor at various American universities which I had to turn down, sometimes regretfully, because we didn’t wish to disturb the children’s education, so I looked forward to a change of academic environment while still remaining within easy reach of home if needed. And it certainly was a change.

  UEA was one of the first of the ‘new universities’ that were built in the sixties and seventies in response to the report of the government-appointed Robbins Committee which called for a massive expansion of higher education in Britain, and it was one of the most successful in attracting talented staff and bright students. These institutions were usually located in pleasant pastoral sites on the outskirts of historic towns and cities, built from scratch on the American campus model, with ample residential accommodation for students. The striking architecture of UEA was the work of the Corbusier-influenced Denys Lasdun, who put all the teaching and research accommodation into a single curving concrete unit half a mile long, with elevated walkways giving access to the various departments and service roads underneath, while the accommodation blocks were terraced ziggurats, like blunt pyramids. It looked rather like a futuristic city from a science fiction illustration plonked down on the flat fields at the edge of Norwich. The architecture wasn’t to everyone’s taste, but it certainly made a statement: this is going to be a new kind of university.

  A considerable number of them were built in various regions of the country. It was an expensive way of boosting the number of university graduates in a system almost entirely funded by the state, for universities are costly institutions to build and equip with adequate libraries and laboratories and study-bedrooms. Arguably it would have been more economical to build fewer of them, investing more in expanding existing urban universities, and encouraging students to attend their local ones, as they commonly did on the Continent. But the Oxbridge model of residential university education, which runs so deep in the psyche of the British establishment, prevailed. The University of Kent at Canterbury even had several ‘colleges’ on its site, between w
hich staff and students were distributed. The new universities were however very popular. Academic staff welcomed the opportunities to initiate new subject areas, courses and research projects, and bright student applicants were also attracted by these features.

  To me, a mature man temporarily separated from his family and a university embedded in a big industrial city, the UEA students seemed to inhabit an enclosed world. The campus contained almost everything they needed – shops, a bank, a post office, a medical centre, a counselling service, places to eat and drink – and many who lived on campus never left it from the beginning of term to the end. Every evening some form of entertainment was available. Feature films were shown for a negligible admission charge in the lecture theatres in the evenings (and I took advantage of them). At the weekends there were rock concerts and dances in venues from which the thud of bass notes and the wail of guitar riffs emanated and vibrated on the night air, though the young people in their flared trousers, cheesecloth shirts and maxi dresses called them not ‘dances’ but ‘bops’, knowing nothing of the bebop of the fifties – jazz that was listened to, not danced to – from which this term must have somehow been derived. Youth culture ruled the campus, and at its centre, in the student union building, there was a room full of pinball machines which was never unoccupied in my observation.

  If the Bradburys had not been at hand I might have been very lonely. Malcolm was on study leave that term, but working from home. I was given his office to use for my weekly ‘office hours’, with his nameplate still on the door, no doubt encouraging the growing tendency of the world to confuse us and the authorship of our books. He and Elizabeth occupied a handsome Queen Anne dower house in a quiet cul-de-sac close to the centre of Norwich. I spent most Sundays with them and their two boys, Matthew and Dominic. They had bought a modern cottage near the coast with a bigger garden than the Norwich house and we practised (rather than played) a decorous form of cricket on the lawn there after lunch, or went for a walk on a nearby beach. Mary and I had often stayed with the family, and as a result we acquired a circle of acquaintance in Norwich and beyond, including Chris Bigsby and his wife Pam, and Anthony and Ann Thwaite, all of whom remained lifetime friends. Chris was Malcolm’s colleague in American Studies and became the leading authority on Arthur Miller, and his official biographer. In their early years at UEA he collaborated with Malcolm on various writing projects including comedy scripts for radio and a TV play, The After Dinner Game, so in a way he filled the place I had occupied in Malcolm’s life when he was at Birmingham, while Pam, a clinical psychologist, became a close friend of Elizabeth as Mary had been. The Thwaites we had known before we knew the Bradburys, through mutual friends at Birmingham. Anthony was a versatile and witty poet in the ‘Movement’ vein, a close friend of Philip Larkin and later editor of his letters, who supported himself working in radio, journalism and publishing. Ann wrote highly praised literary biographies, of Edmund Gosse and A.A. Milne among others. They were (and remain) a lively, hospitable couple who lived in a millhouse beside a stream deep in the country about 10 miles outside Norwich, where they entertained a wide range of literary friends, sometimes in large and bibulous parties. East Anglia attracted many writers as a place to live, property being cheaper there than in the Home Counties, and several of them were employed in the University’s expanding writing programme.

  I had arrived at UEA with a draft of the first chapter of How Far Can You Go? (though it did not yet have a name) in my briefcase, and I spent the first week revising and polishing it to my satisfaction. Then I found myself uncertain how to proceed. There were so many characters, and so much of their lives to cover. What should happen to them and how was I going to interweave their stories? For a while, I was stuck. I have found this often happens in the early stages of writing a novel: you get to a point when you have to make some major decisions that will place constraints on the development of the story, and you hesitate to commit yourself. All the options seem to have potential drawbacks. You may begin to lose faith in the project. I spent an unhappy second week brooding ineffectually on this problem in my silent flat, or while perambulating the muddy banks of an artificial lake the University was in the process of creating. I began to think the whole idea of trying to write a book while away from my usual habitat was a bad one. The breakthrough came when I thought of making the second chapter about the characters’ initiation into sex, or in the case of two of them, one who became a nun and another who was homosexual, their abstention from it. The first chapter was entitled ‘How It Was’ and I decided to call the second one ‘How They Lost Their Virginities’. What reader could resist the lure of that? Since the characters were practising Catholics this theme in most cases entailed dealing with their courtships and marriages, thus moving the story briskly along in time as I desired. The chapters that followed all had the same kind of heading – ‘How Things Began to Change’, ‘How They Lost the Fear of Hell’, ‘How They Broke Out, Away, Down, Up, Through, etc.’ I had not got very far in the sequence by the time I returned home, but it was enough to make me confident of finishing the book, though it took me nearly two years to do so, because of all the other things I was doing: teaching, supervising, reviewing, travelling on professional business and playing my part in family life.

  2

  Like most English parents Mary and I had to grapple with our country’s stratified and politically disputed education system, a task rendered more complex for us by the circumstance that as practising Catholics we were under some pressure to send our children to Catholic schools. Most Catholic primary schools, like most C of E ones, perform well and we did not hesitate to send Julia to the nearest Catholic primary in Harborne after we returned from our first trip to America. But we moved to Northfield a year later and had to place her in the corresponding school in that parish. The readjustment to a new school was made more difficult for her because the Harborne one had adopted the Initial Teaching Alphabet, a method of teaching reading with a simplified spelling system for two years which the pupil then exchanged for the normal alphabet. Hailed by educationalists in the 1960s, ITA later fell into disfavour because of the difficulties pupils experienced in making the transition to normal spelling, and it was eventually abandoned. Julia thrived on the method and had soon used up most of the school’s available storybooks in ITA, but she only had one year of it, and struggled to adjust to the normal alphabet when she transferred to Northfield. Later we discovered that she was dyslexic, which exacerbated the problem, though at that time the Birmingham Education Authority, like most others, refused to recognise the condition and would make no special allowances for her in examinations and assessments.

  Choosing, or attempting to choose, secondary schools for one’s children in Birmingham was a complicated and often stressful process for families. The city had resisted the nationwide comprehensivisation of grammar schools in the early 1970s and a group of them remained under the generic name of ‘King Edward’s’, operating their own 11-plus examinations. If you put your child in for them, and they failed the exam, you forfeited your right to name a preference for a state comprehensive and had to take pot luck. That didn’t concern us, however, as we were Labour voters and believed in comprehensive education. Mary had taught in a comp herself and planned to do so again when she had qualified as a school counsellor. Within walking distance of our home there was a very good one in Northfield called Shenley Court, to which many members of staff at the University sent their children, and we enrolled Julia there.

  To reassure the parish clergy Mary undertook to teach her Catholic doctrine at home, along with two other girls in the same position, and was given a textbook for the purpose. Not thinking much of it, she devised a project for the three girls, to design a book for our Down’s son Christopher, then aged about eight, which would convey to him the basic facts of the Catholic faith, and they responded enthusiastically. Chris accompanied us to mass every Sunday. He seemed to respond to the ritual, liked going up to the altar with us for
a blessing from the celebrant when we took communion, and was eager to receive the sacrament himself. ‘I want body,’ he would say, echoing the words of the consecration, ‘This is my body, this is my blood’. In due course a liberal-minded priest of the parish agreed that he could make his First Communion without having to go to Confession. Christopher had a good sense of what constituted naughtiness but to introduce the idea of sin would have been inappropriate. Historically such children were sometimes called ‘innocents’ in Christian societies.

  Shenley Court school did pretty well by Julia although, perhaps influenced by the fact that her parents were both arts graduates, they did not encourage her to build on her aptitude for biology by taking another science subject, so she did several O levels in arts subjects where her dyslexia was a handicap – not in reading (she devoured books) but in writing, especially spelling. She got an A grade in O Level English Literature in which misspelling was not penalised, but only a B in English Language. In the sixth form she did well in Biology and Computer Science, which Shenley Court enterprisingly offered in the dawn of the digital age, and before long the development of the personal computer with word processing software would enable her to overcome the handicap of dyslexia. But to gain admission to the BSc degree course in Biology at Southampton University she had applied for she needed another A level, which she obtained in Chemistry at a local college of further education after leaving school, while working part-time as a lab assistant at Aston University in the city centre. This job was offered to her by the Professor of Microbiology there, Mike Brown, one of a circle of liberal Catholic friends Mary and I had in Birmingham, when he heard of her situation, and it proved a very useful ‘gap year’ for her.