Vol. 3 No. 10 · 4 June 1981
pages 18-19 | 4445 words
A Catholic Novel
David Lodge
In late August 1964, at the age of 29, I embarked at Southampton on the Queen Mary, bound for New York with my wife Mary, our two children, five suitcases and the first chapter of what I hoped would be my third published novel. I was beginning a year’s leave of absence from my post as lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham to take up a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship in America. This marvellous foundation allows the lucky recipients of its Fellowships to pursue their own programmes of study wherever they like in the United States, requiring them only to spend at least three months travelling, and providing them with a hired car in which to do so. We settled first at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, where I studied American Literature; before we set off, in March 1965, in our brand new Chevrolet Bel Air, on the long, leisurely journey westward that would eventually take us to San Francisco, I had finished The British Museum is failing down and had it accepted.
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Letters
Vol. 3 No. 15 · 20 August 1981
From Alan Hurst
SIR: David Lodge’s rather self-absorbed article/apologia, ‘A Catholic Novel’ (LRB, Vol. 3, No 10), reveals his understandable pique at ‘an exceptionally hostile review’ of one of his Catholic novels. Perhaps such criticism induced him to become both writer of and commentator on his own work? But is it cricket to publish novels and then publish detailed explanations and vindications of them? To champion the ‘reassurance and stability afforded by the Catholic metaphysical system’ while exploiting the endless possibilities of casuistry for personal, artistic and critical mileage?
Lodge’s whole piece seems to exemplify the structuralist fashion of breaking down the distinction between Art and Life, and of self-consciously creating experience rather than attempting merely to describe it.
Alan Hurst
London NW3
Vol. 3 No. 17 · 17 September 1981
From David Lodge
SIR: Alan Hurst (LRB, Vol. 3, No 15) thinks it isn’t quite cricket to publish critical commentary upon one’s own novels. Perhaps he missed, or misread, your editorial note which explained that the article to which he objects, ‘A Catholic Novel’ (LRB, Vol. 3, No 10), was written as an introduction to a reissue, by Secker in July of this year, of my novel The British Museum is falling down, first published 16 years ago, and long out of print. (The references in it to a more recent novel are brief asides.) Such an exercise can hardly avoid being ‘rather self-absorbed’, but I fail to see anything unsporting about it, and there are plenty of precedents – some of them distinguished. Does Mr Hurst think Henry James was not quite playing the game when he published his incomparable Prefaces?
David Lodge
Department of English, University of Birmingham
