A great figure in British literature, David Lodge, who died at the age of 89, depicted with “so British” humor the failings of academia and the torments of Catholics in novels with a high autobiographical content.
“Author of some of the most sublime comedies in English literature, David Lodge is a notoriously sullen man,” wrote The Telegraph about the writer with bushy eyebrows and alternately pinched and mischievous air, author of the best-seller Therapy (1995).
“Students arriving at the University of Birmingham where he taught for decades were said to be stunned by the gulf between the casualness of his novels and the austere professor before them,” the newspaper noted.
The writer was born a few years before the war, on January 28, 1935, a “fairly favorable” time to be born for a future writer in England, he said, in a style typical of his deadpan humor.
His father, a musician in a dance orchestra, left him “all his artistic genes” and his taste for comedy.
From his mother, who was depressed, he felt he inherited chronic anxiety, another dominant trait of his character.
In the modest Catholic home of Brockley, a south London suburb, university is “uncharted territory”. David Lodge is a pure product of the meritocracy of 1950s England.
Prohibitions and irony
Encouraged by his college teachers, the gifted student, passionate about the work of Evelyn Waugh, entered University College London to pursue studies in literature.
There he met Mary, whom he married at 24 and with whom he had three children, the last of whom had Down syndrome.
In 1960, he began teaching English literature at the University of Birmingham, where he spent his entire career.
The same year, he published his first novel The Picturegoersfollowed in 1962 by Ginger, you’re barmy.
These first two essays, unpublished in French, do not yet shine with the sense of comedy which would later make their author successful.
But they are already characteristic of his writing which draws abundantly from his own life. He will devote three memoirs to it, including the last volume, Succeed more or less was published in 2023 in France.
If Catholic prohibitions, particularly sexual ones, so torment the heroes of his first books, such as The Fall of the British Museum (1965) or Evil games (1980), is that the young Lodge was himself subjected to it.
Scrupulous practitioners, the writer and his wife only decided to use contraception after the birth of their son in 1966, he confided.
Likewise, the deafness he suffers from is at the heart of his novel Muted Life (2008).
But it is with his campus trilogy – Change of scenery(1975), A very small world (1984) et Board game (1988) – that he demonstrates the extent of his talent.
Drawing inspiration from his own experience as a professor, and in particular from a long study trip to the United States, he describes with biting irony the university environment through two representatives of this “minority with exacerbated puritanism”, the Englishman Phillip Swallow and American Morris Zapp.
The first volume earned him the prestigious Hawthorndern Prize, which recognized him as an author, courted by television, which adapted some of his works. In Therapy (1995), he sketches the world of media elites, particularly television.
From 1987, David Lodge left his teaching position to devote himself entirely to writing, but he remained an academic at heart, alternating between the publication of novels, scholarly essays on the art of fiction and biographies of writers.
“David Lodge will be read long after most of his peers for the simple reason that, in his early works, he was able to capture so perfectly what Britain was,” said of him The Guardian.
Related News :