David Lodge (1935-2025) R.I.P.

The Society regrets to announce that its Honorary President, David Lodge, died earlier this week on 1 January 2025 at the age of 89. He was a few weeks away from his 90th birthday. There are several obituaries in today’s papers, of which that in the Daily Telegraph (unsigned) is probably the most detailed. Here are the introductory paragraphs:

David Lodge, who has died aged 89, was too skilled a novelist simply to replay his own life in his fiction, but he wrote repeatedly in his prize-winning and popular books about two subjects close to his heart: academic life and Roman Catholicism; his attraction to and affection for both did not, however, prevent him from casting a comic, critical eye over them.

“Each of my novels,” he once said, “corresponds to a particular phase or aspect of my own life: for example, going to the University of California at the height of the Student Revolution, being an English Catholic at a period of great change in the Church, getting on to the international academic conference circuit; but this does not mean they are not autobiographical in any simple, straightforward sense.  I begin with a hunch that what I have experienced or observed had some representative–i.e., more than merely private–significance that could be brought out by means of a fictional story.”

Lodge spent 27 years teaching at Birmingham University, retiring as Professor of English in 1987. Along with Professor Malcolm Bradbury of the University of East Anglia–whom he referred to as “my closest friend”–he more or less invented the modern “campus novel.” More playful than satirical, it wore its seriousness of purpose lightly, and was always set amid the concrete sprawl of Britain’s  burgeoning “new” universities of the 1960s…

The Guardian also has a detailed article which is written by literary critic and scholar John Mullan. Here are the concluding paragraphs:

…In 2008 he published what was, in many ways, his most autobiographical novel, and one of his best, Deaf Sentence. Lodge had started losing his hearing in his mid-40s. Up to this point, only those closest to him had realised that his partial deafness had deeply influenced him. It contributed to his decision to retire from academia and turned him in on himself. Struggling to keep up with conversations, he said, had stopped him being amusing. Lodge often spoke of his feelings of anxiety, undiminished by literary success or academic standing. Yet the deafness that depressed him in life became comic in his novel.

Admirers of Lodge’s novels were often surprised to find him, in person, dolefully reflective. This was the spirit of his memoir, Quite a Good Time to Be Born, published in 2015. Covering the period from his birth to his breakthrough, at the age of 40, with Changing Places, it gives (despite the title) a glum and minutely circumstantial account of growing up a Roman Catholic in the 1940s and 50s.

Lodge looks back with some amazement at his younger self’s respect for Catholic doctrine. Two further volumes of memoirs, covering later periods of his life, followed. Writer’s Luck (2018), should have relished his middle years of celebrity and success, but is more precise about the small disappointments of his literary life. Varying Degrees of Success (2020), covering the years after academia, lets us know just how wearying the business of writing can be.

His last published work of fiction was The Man Who Wouldn’t Get Up (2016), a collection of short stories mostly composed between the 1950s and 90s. Humorously fable-like, they serve as a reminder of this melancholy man’s comic instinct. Fiction allowed him to combine his literary-critical intelligence with a gift for observing absurdities, in order to fashion his own peculiarly bleak brand of comedy…

The obituary in today’s issue of The Times is also worth reading and elaborates on some of the same points as those in the other papers. Here are the concluding paragraphs from The Times’ unsigned article:

…Lodge’s campus novels continued to live long in the memory, aided by successful television adaptations of Small World in 1988, and Nice Work (by Lodge himself) in 1989. The latter won the Royal Television Society award for best serial. Lodge also won plaudits for his 1994 adaptation of Dickens’s novel Martin Chuzzlewit, with Tom Wilkinson as a magnificent Pecksniff.

Lodge’s wife, Mary, predeceased him in 2022. He is survived by their three children, Julia, Stephen and Christopher.

His novels remain relevant, ready to entertain a new generation, and he was inordinately pleased that the fictional universities of Limerick and Gloucestershire are now real ones as a result of life imitating his art…

Hopefully, the BBC will take this opportunity to recognize David Lodge’s heritage by replaying one or more of the adaptations mentioned in The Times’ article.

If you look at the photo of the Society’s 2011 Conference delegates on this website’s home page, Prof. Lodge is standing near the front in a light colored trench coat next to a delegate to his right (the viewer’s left) with very red hair. Paula Byrne is a few delegates to his left just behind those in the front row. Obituaries have also appeared in the New York Times and the Los Angeles Times as well as several other regional and national papers in both the US and Britain and elsewhere.