Book review: Lives in Writing by David Lodge

Inspiring essays on Bennett, Bradbury... and Diana

Princess Diana shared with the late literary critic Frank Kermode a quality which David Lodge celebrates in this essay collection.

Diana was captivating without “straining for effect” while “unforced eloquence” was Kermode’s métier. As one who makes writing look easy, Lodge knows that effortlessness is illusory. Among the forces thrashing beneath the surface of a novel are real events that demand to be channelled into fiction by language and the author’s imagination. This is the subject of Lives in Writing.

In the opening three essays, which are reworked reviews of biographies, Lodge draws on his creative instincts, honed over 15 novels, and his encounters with Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis and Muriel Spark, to pinpoint events which might have fed their fiction. “Everything happens to an artist; time is always redeemed,” Spark wrote, which is echoed when Lodge quotes Alan Bennett: “For a writer nothing is ever quite as bad as it is for other people because, however dreadful, it may be of use.”

Bennett is, Lodge believes, “more at ease with the homely, the private, even the trivial than … big historical ideas and epic events”. I’d counter that the depiction of the personal consequences of Thatcherism in Talking Heads is one of many instances where Bennett dramatises history’s impact on individuals. In the only essay which isn’t about a writer, Lodge illuminates the “extraordinarily literary quality” of Diana’s death, but makes the exaggerated claim that it left Britain “swamped by an extraordinarily powerful tidal wave of emotion”.

His account of his competitive friendship with Malcolm Bradbury is gorgeous. “He was thrifty with ideas,” Lodge writes and later reveals that when Bradbury was dying in 2000: “I pitied him from the bottom of my heart.” Bradbury opposed the expansion of higher education while Lodge, whose headmaster persuaded his parents to let him attend university in the 1950s, considers tuition fees its inevitable consequence. Presumably he doesn’t fear that they discourage the parents of today’s students.

His fascinating description of writing his 2011 novel A Man of Parts, about H G Wells, would have been better if he’d explained the vogue for biographical fiction instead of merely recognising a “cultural phenomenon”.

It’s not surprising that these essays exude expertise but Lodge’s enthusiasm, as he approaches 80, is infectious too. I smiled while reading them, buzzing with inspiration and disputatiousness, as Lodge reminded me why I love some writers and gave me impetus to discover new ones.

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