We have all been to the University of Rummidge. At least in our minds. It comprises a group of starkly constructed towers, standing grey against some greenfield site on the perimeters of a big, urban sprawl.
Riven with inter-departmental rivalries and sexual betrayals, it is an idea of place that has permeated British literature and television drama for the past 30 years. In fact, so much so it is easy to forget that Rummidge, the priapic father to all those other imaginary academic outposts littered across England, was actually invented by the author David Lodge. He created Rummidge, a thinly disguised version of his own teaching base at Birmingham university, in his influential 1975 novel, Changing Places, the first of a trilogy set on a 'redbrick' campus.
So we don't expect Lodge, mild-mannered champion of regional literature and master of the world of the frustrated, side-lined British don, to turn his attention to recreating the privileged and comparatively glamorous life of the novelist Henry James. The glittering whirl of cultural acquisitiveness, grand passions and sophisticated European tourism in the late 1800s could not be more removed from the canteens and lecture halls of Rummidge in the mid-1970s.
Yet Lodge's new fictional work, Author, Author, tells of the lost, middle years of James's life in which we find him wrestling with the conviction that he will never be popular or famous as a writer. The story concentrates on his friendship with George du Maurier, the Punch magazine illustrator, who was to suddenly enjoy huge commercial success with his novel, Trilby. Lodge has said he was drawn to write about these difficult London years of James's life when he was asked to adapt Trilby for television. He discovered then that du Maurier had first offered the idea to James, who turned it down.
'And then Trilby turned out to be this huge bestseller, which is something James never had,' said Lodge. The wounds to James's pride were all the greater when the stage version of Trilby went on to play to audiences to much greater acclaim than his own new drama, Guy Domville.
'I was interested in James's five-year campaign to conquer the English stage,' Lodge explained earlier this year. 'How it collapsed, how it coincided with the extraordinary success of his friend. Then, with the sudden death of du Maurier, James re-dedicating himself to the art of fiction.'
The choice of subject for Lodge is all the more surprising when we discover he is well aware of James's own dislike of historical novels. His prejudice was that it was impossible to imagine yourself into the consciousness of a previous generation.
James once even wrote in warning to a hopeful lady author of an historical novel: 'You may multiply little facts that can be got from pictures and documents, relics and prints, as much as you like - the real thing is almost impossible to do, and in its absence the whole effect is as nought; I mean the invention, the representation of the old consciousness - the soul, the sense, the horizon, the vision of individuals in whose minds half the things that make ours, that make the modern world, were non-existent.'
Undeterred, Lodge, who retired from academia in 1987 to devote himself to writing full-time, has joined the rash of authors who, unknown to each other, have each been working away at books influenced by James. Colm Toibin's fictional biography The Master portrays the writer as a repressed homosexual, while Alan Hollinghurst's satirical book The Line of Beauty tells the story of a James-obsessed protagonist who leads a colourful gay sex life. Emma Tennant's Felony used the facts behind James's short story, The Aspern Papers, to weave her own fiction about the morality of adapting the truth for literary ends.
Novelist Toby Litt's has also been inspired by James's most popular work, The Turn of the Screw. His Ghost Story pays homage to this, perhaps the ultimate psychological thriller, although Litt has denied it is a direct updating.
Lodge's new book is different. It is about the problems of being a novelist. 'My interest,' he has said, 'was to do with the profession of letters, literary ambition and rivalry and in particular what happens if a novelist goes into the field of writing for performance.'
Clearly, he is far from alone in still feeling the power of James's writing. Extraordinary creative talents like James always attract fans. But Lodge's own work, in a quiet and less exotic way, has probably been almost as significant for many modern British writers. As one of the creators of the campus novel, along with Howard Jacobson and the late Malcolm Bradbury, he gave voice to the concerns of the educated middle class. Sometimes it is writers whose experiences are closer to their readers' own who have more of an influence on the way the world is seen.
Together with gentle comics such as Michael Frayn and Alan Ayckbourn, and perhaps the television writing of Alan Plater and Andrew Davies, Lodge has entered the consciousness of a whole social milieu.
'David has done some really brilliant things,' says the Cambridge don Dame Gillian Beer, former president of Clare College, who is a friend of Lodge. 'It is impossible to go around the world to lecture at conferences without constantly being aware of his work and the fact that it is rather like a medieval romance, where the same characters keep popping up every 600 pages.'
The concerns of Lodge's writing have spread widely, she thinks. 'I was reading Coetzee's new book, Elizabeth Costello, the other day and I noticed traces of the campus novel there, although Coetzee has perhaps cracked it open and taken it out of itself.'
Lodge represents, though, the last of the original campus novelists. The writer Al Kennedy, who was helped by Lodge in her early career, suspects both he and Bradbury had the rug pulled out from under them by changes in attitudes to education and, in particular, to the funding of it.
'That idea of a coming generation who would benefit from the increased availability of education has been betrayed at every level,' Kennedy says.
It is something that Lodge has been explicit about, too. It drove him out of university life.
In 1994, he said academia had become colourless and depressed rather than a source of 'intellectual energy' for the country. 'The new management ethos is to blame. Since I retired in '87, things have radically changed, and I don't regret at all my decision to go: today I would be pretty conscious of a worsening in the quality of life.'
Optimistic products of the war years, he was one of a group of writers in the seventies who have been let down, according to Alan Plater.
'We were all children of the Fifties and Sixties, a period of great hope and aspiration and ideals. Clearly the whole process of change is going to take a little longer than we thought,' he says.
For, although Lodge parodied provincial university life in Changing Places, and then in the sequels Small World in 1984 and Nice Work in 1988, his commitment to teaching was complete. Like Bradbury, who set up the highly productive creative writing course at the University of East Anglia, he believed in helping young writers.
'When I was first writing he was always incredibly kind,' remembers Al Kennedy. 'Far from spikey and ungenerous, if that is the common image of successful writers, he was very concerned to encourage.' Lodge also emphasised writing that was not London-centric. He wanted to keep away from the geographic and establishment bias in British writing.
'The Bradbury/Lodge project, if I can call it that, was to redress the Oxbridge balance,' says Plater. Fashionable for a while, Plater regards this as still an important task.
Born in 1935 in South London, Lodge had a suburban upbringing within a traditional Catholic family. He went to a state-aided Catholic grammar school in Blackheath run by the De La Salle order and was academically inspired at the age of 14 by one of the lay teachers who set him a gruelling essay on 'the techniques of poetry'. Much of his childhood experience is mined for his first novel, The Picturegoers, written in 1960. He went on to study at University College, London.
Lodge's third novel, The British Museum is Falling Down, features a pastiche of Henry James writing style and tells the story of a young Catholic writer trying to cope with the suspected pregnancy of his wife while he studies the work of great authors.
After the campus trilogy, he looked again at the Catholic church in How Far Can You Go? and Paradise News. Religion is a recurrent theme which has also fed his interest in the work of the Catholic writers Evelyn Waugh and Graham Greene, on whom he has published literary criticism. His professional interest in critical theory as an English professor also came together with his storytelling in his most recent novel, Thinks ..., in which Lodge returned again to campus life, this time at the fictional University of Gloucester. This story also drew heavily on scientific developments in the understanding of the biological function of consciousness itself. It was a trick that impressed Gillian Beer with its modernity. 'It is striking how he has managed to take on neuroscience and use that as a literary device too,' she says.
When it comes to Henry James, Lodge's current obsession, it is possible the former English professor is enamoured of the American arch-stylist precisely because they write so differently. 'Lodge uses quite short sentences and James, of course, is very involuted, so it could be the attraction of opposites,' suggests Beer.
Al Kennedy thinks the answer could be more direct. James is a New World author in search, like many of his characters, of an Old World identity. Lodge, is a writer who, observing the literary establishment, has striven to find his identity outside it.
David Lodge
DoB: 28 January 1935
Title: Emeritus professor of English Literature, University of Birmingham
Education: St Joseph's Academy, Blackheath; University College, London
Family: Married (in 1959) to Mary Frances Jacob (two sons and one daughter)
