David John Lodge (28 January 1935 – 1 January 2025) was an English novelist and critic. He was a literature professor at the University of Birmingham until 1987, and some of his novels satirise academic life, notably the "Campus Trilogy" – Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses (1975), Small World: An Academic Romance (1984) and Nice Work (1988). The latter two were shortlisted for the Booker Prize. Another theme is Roman Catholicism, beginning from his first published novel The Picturegoers (1960).

Lodge also wrote television screenplays and three stage plays. After retiring, he continued to publish literary criticism. His edition of Twentieth Century Literary Criticism (1972) includes essays on 20th-century writers such as T. S. Eliot. In 1992, he published The Art of Fiction, a collection of essays on literary techniques with illustrative examples from great authors, such as "Point of View" (Henry James), "The Stream of Consciousness" (Virginia Woolf) and "Interior Monologue" (James Joyce), beginning with "Beginning" and ending with "Ending".

Lodge's works were widely recognised with literary, and other national and international honours. He was appointed Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres in 1997 and became a Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) the following year.

Biography

Lodge was born in Dulwich and brought up in nearby Brockley, south-east London. His family home until 1959 was 81 Millmark Grove, a residential street of 1930s terraced houses between Brockley Cross and Barriedale. His father, a saxophonist, played in a dance band. Lodge's first published novel, The Picturegoers (1960), draws on early experiences in "Brickley" (based on Brockley) and his childhood home, which he revisits again in later novels, Therapy (1995), Deaf Sentence (2008) and Quite A Good Time to be Born: A Memoir (2015). The Second World War forced Lodge and his mother to evacuate to Surrey and Cornwall. He attended the Catholic St Joseph's Academy, Blackheath.

University studies

In 1952, Lodge entered University College London, where he gained a first-class Bachelor of Arts degree in 1955.

Family and early career

In 1959, Lodge and Jacob married at the age of 24. Lodge later said, "It seems extraordinary now. I had no prospects, no job, little money, but it never bothered me. We didn't really want children at the point they came along, but we got on with it." They had children in 1960 and 1963, a son and a daughter, and a second son, Christopher, born in 1966 with Down syndrome. In 1963, Lodge collaborated with Bradbury and another student, James Duckett, on a satirical revue for the Birmingham Repertory Theatre entitled Between These Four Walls, performed in the autumn of 1963. The cast included Julie Christie. During the performance of a certain skit that involved a radio being played on stage, Lodge and the audience heard news of the assassination of John F. Kennedy: In August 1964, Lodge and his family went to the United States, on a scholarship from the Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship. It required Lodge to travel at least three months out of twelve in the United States, with a car provided by the donor. The family first lived in Providence, Rhode Island, where David Lodge followed the American literature course at Brown University. During this period, free of teaching obligations, Lodge was able to complete a third novel, The British Museum Is Falling Down. In March 1965 the family went on a trip across the country, eventually moving to San Francisco.

Later career

From 1967 to 1987, Lodge continued his academic career at the University of Birmingham, becoming Professor of English Literature in 1976, while writing several more novels and essays. In 1969, he became an associate professor at the University of California, Berkeley. Lodge retired from his post at Birmingham in 1987 to become a full-time writer:

Dissemination and reception

Lodge's work first came to wider notice in Britain in 1975, when he won the Hawthornden prize for Changing Places. He went on to win the Whitbread Book of the Year award in 1980 for How Far Can You Go? and the Sunday Express Book of the Year in 1988 for Nice Work. Two of his early novels were reissued during this period (Ginger You're Barmy, 1962/1982, and The British Museum is Falling Down, 1965/1981). His novels appeared in paperback in the 1960s with Pan and Panther Books, with Penguin Books from 1980 and with Vintage Publishing (Random House Group) since 2011. Vintage has reissued most of his earlier work. Lodge has been shortlisted for the Booker Prize twice, for Small World and Nice Work, and in 1989, Lodge chaired the Booker Prize judges. His 1970 novel Out of the Shelter was long-listed for the Lost Man Booker Prize in 2010. Anthony Burgess called Lodge "one of the best novelists of his generation".

His books are routinely translated into other languages, including Czech, Estonian, German, Italian, Japanese, Polish, Portuguese, Romanian, Russian, Spanish and Turkish.

Narrative techniques

In The Art of Fiction (1992), Lodge studied, through examination of extracts from novels, various stylistic devices (repetition, variation in levels of language, etc.) and narrative techniques (varying viewpoints, defamiliarisation, etc.). Lodge self-consciously uses many of these techniques in his own novels. For example, in Paradise News (1991) the narration is mostly third-person point of view, but there are also first-person narratives (diary and autobiography, letters, postcards, emails) and various other documents, such as theoretical writings on tourism. In Therapy (1995) the bulk of the novel is told through the protagonist's diary, but there are other texts, presented as written by minor characters about the main character. It is eventually revealed that these were all written by the main character, as part of a therapy exercise.

Television

Two of Lodge's novels have been adapted into television serials: Small World (1988), and Nice Work (1989). Nice Work was adapted by Lodge himself and filmed at the University of Birmingham. He also adapted his play The Writing Game for television (1995). In 1994 Lodge adapted Dickens's Martin Chuzzlewit for a BBC series. Lodge notes that The Old Rep was one of his favourite theatres, with a long distinguished history and the likes of Laurence Olivier, Edith Evans, Ralph Richardson, Albert Finney and Derek Jacobi performing there. He referred to the theatre as "a gem", but noted that shabby as it was then, he could not have had a better venue for his first attempt at writing for the professional stage.

The Writing Game is about the staff, teachers and students at a residential course for writers. The action is interspersed with readings by the characters of their own works in progress. According to Lodge, the play "originated in the experience of teaching such a course myself – not because its plot bears any resemblance to what happened on that course, but because it struck me that the bare situation possessed the classic dramatic unities of time, place and action. Indeed it would be true to say that I invented the plot of my play to fulfil the dramatic possibilities inherent in the situation." The play opened at the Birmingham Repertory Theatre on 13 May 1990 and ran for three weeks. An American production was staged at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge, Massachusetts in March 1991. Lodge later adapted the play for television. It was broadcast on Channel 4 on Sunday 18 February 1996, attracting 1.2 million viewers.

Home Truths was performed at the Birmingham Rep in 1998. The story mainly focuses on Adrian Ludlow, a semi-retired writer interviewed by Fanny Tarrant, a journalist famous for sarcastic portrayals. Lodge later rewrote it as a novella of the same name.

Lodge adapted his novel Thinks ... as a two-character play, Secret Thoughts, which opened at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton on 12 May 2011. The Stage called it "an intriguing, intensely witty, brainy play.... one of the most compelling two-handers imaginable". The Guardians review said that "Lodge's novel boils down neatly into an intellectually and erotically charged dialogue on the nature of the mind", yet felt that "Lodge cannot quite eradicate the sense that some of the cerebral jousting has a more natural home in a novel than on stage." Secret Thoughts won Best New Play at the Manchester Theatre Awards, hailed as a "bracing and ambitious production that wowed everyone who saw it".

Awards and recognition

Lodge's works were widely recognised with literary, and other national and international honours.

  • Whitbread Book of the Year (1980) for How Far Can You Go?
  • Appointed Commander of the Order of the British Empire (CBE) in the 1998 New Year Honours for services to literature.
  • The television serialisation of Nice Work, which he adapted, won the Royal Television Society's Award for best Drama serial in 1989 and a Silver Nymph at the International Television Festival, Monte Carlo, 1990.
  • Secret Thoughts, adapting his own novel Thinks..., won Best New Play award in the Manchester Theatre Awards at the Octagon Theatre, Bolton.

Bibliography

Lodge's collected written works included books and essays of fiction, literary criticism, and autobiography, as well as a number of plays and screenplays.

Fiction

  • The Picturegoers, 1960
  • Ginger You're Barmy, 1962
  • The British Museum Is Falling Down, 1965
  • Out of the Shelter, 1970
  • Changing Places: A Tale of Two Campuses, 1975
  • How Far Can You Go? (US edition: Souls and Bodies), 1980
  • Small World: An Academic Romance, 1984
  • Nice Work, 1988
  • Paradise News, 1991
  • A David Lodge Trilogy, 1993 (The Campus Trilogy in later editions) — single volume comprising Changing Places, Small World and Nice Work
  • Therapy, 1995
  • The Man Who Wouldn't Get Up and Other Stories, 1998 — expanded edition with two additional stories, 2016
  • Home Truths, 1999 (novella, written from original play)
  • Thinks ..., 2001
  • Author, Author, 2004
  • Deaf Sentence, 2008
  • A Man of Parts (H. G. Wells), 2011

Non-fiction

  • Language of Fiction, 1966
  • Graham Greene, 1966
  • The Novelist at the Crossroads, 1971
  • Evelyn Waugh, 1971
  • Twentieth Century Literary Criticism, 1972
  • The Modes of Modern Writing, 1977
  • Working with Structuralism, 1981
  • Write On, 1986
  • After Bakhtin, 1990
  • The Art of Fiction, 1992
  • Modern Criticism and Theory: A Reader, 1992
  • The Practice of Writing, 1997
  • Consciousness and the Novel: Connected Essays, 2002
  • The Year of Henry James: The Story of a Novel, 2006
  • Lives in Writing, 2014

Autobiography

  • Quite a Good Time To Be Born: a Memoir, 1935–75, 2015
  • Writer's Luck: A Memoir: 1976–1991, 2018
  • Varying Degrees of Success: A Memoir: 1992–2020, 2020

Theatre

  • The Writing Game, 1990
  • Home Truths, 1999
  • Secret Thoughts (based on Thinks...), 2011

Adaptations for television

  • Small World, 1988
  • Nice Work, 1989
  • Martin Chuzzlewit, 1994
  • The Writing Game, 1995

References

Further reading

  • Ammann, Daniel. David Lodge and the Art-and-Reality Novel. Heidelberg, Germany: Universitätsverlag C. Winter 1991.
  • Bergonzi, Bernard. David Lodge (Writers and Their Work). Tavistock, UK: Northcote House Publishers, 1995.
  • Martin, Bruce K. David Lodge. New York: Twayne, 1999.
  • David Lodge biography at contemporarywriters.com
  • David Lodge Living under a deaf sentence, Sunday Times, 20 April 2008.
  • David Lodge Papers – University of Birmingham, Cadbury Research Library, Special Collections