Interview with David Lodge

David Lodge is a novelist, critic and Emeritus Professor of English Literature at Birmingham University, where he taught for many years. His novels, which have been translated into some twenty-five languages, include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Therapy and most recently Deaf Sentence. He has also written stage plays and screenplays.

Mark Thwaite: Is Deaf Sentence based on your own experiences David?

David Lodge: The portrayal of the central character's deafness is closely based on my own experience, and it is exceedingly unlikely that I would have thought of writing a novel about this condition if it I hadn't I suffered from it myself. From my late forties I was afflicted with gradually worsening high-frequency deafness, the most common form of hearing impairment, which makes it difficult to distinguish consonants, especially when there is a lot of background noise. The character of Desmond's father is also closely based on my own father who died in 1999. He was also deaf, as a result of old age, but wouldn't wear a hearing aid, so communication between us was often difficult.

Mark Thwaite: Our hero, Desmond Bates, is a Retired Professor of Linguistics -- is Deaf Sentence still a kind of campus novel then?

David Lodge: I have always tried to play variations on the classic campus novel -- having two campuses in different continents in Changing Places, for instance, and exploring the "global campus" in Small World. Deaf Sentence could be called a retirement campus novel, since the main character is retired, but misses the academic environment and the status he enjoyed in it, still hangs around his old university campus, and gets involved with a postgraduate student there. This element in his character is not autobiographical. I retired early to write full-time and have been very fully occupied ever since.

Mark Thwaite: What makes the academic milieu such a wonderful productive subject area for you?

David Lodge: I know it well, having spent 27 years of my adult life as a university teacher, and novelists tend to write about milieux they know intimately. It's changed a lot in that time, and those changes reflect changes in society at large which also figure in my campus novels: the emergence of feminism and the counter-culture in the late sixties/early seventies in Changing Places , for example, or the economic upheaval of Thatcherism in Britain in the 80s in Nice Work. The academic institution is a small world, a microcosm of society as a whole, in which themes like the operation of power, ambition, and sexual desire, can be studied in a comic and satiric rather than tragic manner. The fact that university staff are theoretically committed to the preservation of high culture, and the pursuit of truth, but are fallible human beings with ordinary human weaknesses and perhaps more than usual eccentricities, makes a good setting for comic and satirical writing.

Mark Thwaite: Deaf Sentence is wonderfully funny -- is funny difficult? Are you funny in real life!?

David Lodge: Yes, funny is hard work. So much humour depends on timing and the way in which information is channelled to the reader. Comedy of situation depends on surprising the reader with some absurd or incongruous action which is nevertheless logical, and this means you must both prepare for it and conceal it in advance. At the level of the sentence, humour depends on the choice and order of words. To write well you must always be good at anticipating the reaction of readers to your text, and this is particularly important in comedy.

Mark Thwaite: What was the most difficult aspect of writing this particular novel? How did you overcome it?

David Lodge: There were two main problems. One was to provide a narrative element which put Desmond in some kind of jeopardy, because his deafness and his Dad's plight, although full of human interest, do not generate a great deal of suspense. I solved this problem (I think) through the character of Alex, the troubled and troubling young woman with whom Desmond gets involved. She is a wholly invented character. The second problem was to combine the comedy generated by Desmond's deafness with the serious exploration of the theme of mortality which is associated with it in the punning title of the novel. The novel modulates from a predominantly comic tone into an elegiac one as it approaches the end of the story. It is not for me to say how well I have managed it, but most readers seemed to feel it works.

Mark Thwaite: How do you write? Longhand or directly onto a computer, straight off or with lots and lots of editing?

David Lodge: When I started writing novels more than fifty years ago I would write the whole thing out in longhand, and then type it up, revising as I went along. Later I would write a few pages at a time in longhand and then type them up. When I acquired a computer the longhand drafts became more and more sketchy, and most of the work was done on the computer. Now I write straight on to the computer and constantly print out pages which I edit by hand and then save in a revised form on the computer. Every page goes through multiple drafts in this way.

Mark Thwaite: Do you read the critics? Have you been pleased with the responses to your books in general and this book in particular? Have you learned anything from them?

David Lodge: I skim the reviews as they come out to get a sense of how the book is being received, and may read some carefully again later if I think they are interesting and based on a careful reading of the book. Every writer, even if they are considered successful, will inevitably get some negative reviews some of the time, and nobody enjoys reading them. I don't publish a novel unless I am satisfied with it, so a dismissive review is wounding. The reviews of Deaf Sentence were largely very favourable -- the best overall I've received for some time -- but the one really nasty one still niggles. What I learn from reviews is the variety of responses a novel will produce from different readers -- even those who like it very much. You have to remember that no reviewer is completely objective. They have their own agendas and reputations to uphold. On the whole I avoid reading academic criticism of my novels because, even when it is favourable, it is usually designed to display the critic's professional mastery over the text and this is slightly unsettling to a writer -- though I do it myself when I write criticism!

Mark Thwaite: Are you fully recovered from your Year of Henry James!?

David Lodge: I'm not sure I will ever fully recover. I remain convinced that Author! Author! is one of my best novels and would have been much more successful if a very good novel about the same subject hadn't been published six months earlier. However I did feel finally able to read Colm Toibin's The Master at the end of last year without pain and indeed with pleasure, though I was chiefly struck by how totally different our characterizations of Henry James are.

Mark Thwaite: What do you do when you are not writing?

David Lodge: I think about how the work in progress is going, and I read a lot, of course. If you mean what non-literary things do I do, I play tennis about once a week all through the year, go for a sauna and swim with about the same regularity, watch TV (football, documentaries, good drama), take turns in cooking the evening meal for myself and my wife, eat out about once a week, go to art galleries, the cinema and the theatre (though deafness has impaired those last two pleasures to some extent). That's about it.

Mark Thwaite: Did you have an idea in your mind of your "ideal" reader? Did you write specifically for them?

David Lodge: One's ideal reader is intelligent, alert, open-minded but demanding, and equipped with what Hemingway called "a built-in shit-detector." He/she does not actually exist. In a way you try to be that reader when you read and re-read your own work in progress, and not to kid yourself if something isn't quite right. That's a rather different matter from one's "readership" which in my case, I'm aware, is probably well-educated, well-read, maybe Catholic, and getting more and more senior in years, like myself. I'm lucky that I have a large international audience through translation, but it's impossible and would be dangerous to think of them when you are writing. You have to write for your own language community.

Mark Thwaite: What are you working on now David?

David Lodge: I'm writing a novel, but I never I never talk about work in progress until it's completed or fairly near completion.

Mark Thwaite: Who is your favourite writer? What is/are your favourite book(s)?

David Lodge: James Joyce and Ulysses is the short answer. Other favourite books: Jane Austen's Emma, Dickens' Bleak House, Henry James's The Ambassadors, Conrad's Heart of Darkness, Evelyn Waugh's Vile Bodies, Graham Greene's The End of the Affair, Kingsley Amis's Lucky Jim.

Mark Thwaite: Favourite quote?

David Lodge: "Ars longa, vita brevis." ("Art takes a long time, life is short." Attributed to Seneca)

Mark Thwaite: Any tips for the aspiring writer?

David Lodge: Read a lot. Keep a notebook -- a diary may be too time-consuming. Try to read your own work as if you didn't write it, and ask yourself how it would affect you in that persona.

Mark Thwaite: Anything else you would like to say?

David Lodge: I think that's enough to be going on with. Thanks for your interest.