In the second year of the pandemic I was the unexpecting recipient of a trove of books written by the British novelist and critic David Lodge, who died on January 1. These arrived in unpredictable installments—five one week, three the next, four more a month after that. They came in plastic shopping bags, courtesy of a friend whose own friend had passed them along to him; my friend had no interest.
At the time I had little knowledge of Lodge’s work, save for a memoir excerpt that appeared in Commonweal and his 1992 collection of pieces on the craft, The Art of Fiction, which as a youthful aspirant to the writing life I pored over with avid interest. (Today I blush at my insistent highlighting of Lodge’s description of James Joyce as “an apostate Catholic for whom the writer’s vocation was a kind of profane priesthood.”) Lodge proved good company during those days of shuttered offices and social distancing. Erudite, thoughtful, a deft composer of plot and shrewd observer of character in vivid social and historical settings—much as the tributes after his death noted. “To write a novel is to conduct imaginary personages through imaginary space and time in a way that will be simultaneously interesting, perhaps amusing, surprising yet convincing, representative or significant in a more than merely personal, private sense,” Lodge said in 1996’s The Practice of Writing. Over half a century of continuous output (in addition to stage- and screenplays, memoirs, and serious works of criticism), he tended to meet these imperatives.
I randomly selected Lodge’s first novel, The Picturegoers (1960), to start with. The breathless jacket copy (“Mark, the cynical intellectual, who seeks sensuality in the body of an ex-novice and finds spirituality; Clare, his girlfriend, who loses faith and discovers passion; Father Kipling, the scandalized priest…”) doesn’t do it justice. “Sharp and real,” Kingsley Amis said of it approvingly—not a bad way to be welcomed to the literary scene. I jumped around among others, including Paradise News (1991), in which a laicized Catholic priest visits his terminally ill aunt in Hawaii; Author, Author (2004), an absorbing historical novel about Henry James, which had the misfortune of appearing the same year as Colm Tóibín’s better received effort on the same subject; and a Man of Parts (2011), a novelization of the life of H. G. Wells—the best of this particular bunch. I turned expectantly to the work for which Lodge was best known, Campus Trilogy, comprising the novels Changing Places (1975), Small World (1984), and Nice Work (1988), which dramatize “the brief heyday of English literature as a discipline and the jet-setting lifestyle of its professoriate,” in the words of Lodge’s New York Times obituary. That heyday being so brief and increasingly distant, the trilogy read in 2021 as somewhat dated and was not quite as funny as billed.
Here my David Lodge year might have ended if not for 1980’s How Far Can You Go? (published as Souls and Bodies in the United States, an excerpt of which appeared in Commonweal). The novel explores the experiences and relationships of a group of British Catholic friends over more than twenty-five years, beginning in 1952 and on up to the arrival of Pope John Paul II. A pivotal incident is the issuing of 1968’s Humanae vitae, and it serves as a way for Lodge, with occasional metafictional touches, to investigate his characters’ changing attitudes toward the Church and their own post–Vatican II faith in a time of sexual liberation and accelerating secularism. “How They Lost the Fear of Hell” is the title of a crucial chapter and indicative of the general shift they undergo. Institutional obedience wanes and long-burdened consciences are liberated, but they maintain an attachment to Catholicism through agape dinners and lively debate over doctrine and the direction of the Church. “Overcoming the gap between the lingering experience of rule-based Catholicism and the demands of an adult faith,” is how former Commonweal editor Margaret O’Brien Steinfels succinctly characterized the novel’s main dramatic conflict, and that conflict is explored knowledgeably and sympathetically while leavened by occasional humor.
When I told an older practicing Catholic I was reading How Far Can You Go?, he laughed and said it was a book aimed at his generation, not mine. Indeed, Lodge was born in 1935, the same year as my father, and four years before my mother. Odd perhaps, then, that the events of the novel felt so immediate—though I suspect I was undergoing something of a vicarious or even nostalgic experience. Lodge uncannily captures what I remember of my parents’ relationship with the Church in the 1970s, when I was a child. They remained somewhat more bound to conventional parish life than Lodge’s characters, and belonged to the particular milieu of suburban American Catholicism of that era. But they were also caught up in the ferment of the time. I recall energetic “discussions” about Vietnam, pacifism, nuclear weapons, poverty, and lay involvement in the liturgy—if not about birth control (a topic central to Lodge’s 1965 novel, The British Museum is Falling Down), though I’m sure there had to be some talk of it behind closed doors. Confessions on Saturday evenings came to seem less about admitting catechetic transgression than seeking guidance on living in a world that presented urgent spiritual, financial, and domestic challenges, hints of which could be gleaned from their conversations on the drive home from church. Some parish priests, it became clear, were more receptive to this confessional mode than others.
It is important not to romanticize these memories or to take them, so to speak, as gospel; the realities must be more layered and complex. Moreover, I don’t recall any conversations explicitly taking up the heavy topic of “faith” as such. But the “demands of an adult faith” were likely responsible for the charge in the local atmosphere, which must have sparked something in me in spite of my sullen, adolescent resistance. By the time I became a teenager, Ronald Reagan had been elected president and John Paul II was in the Vatican. The world they ushered in was the one in which, with trepidation and skepticism (much of it later justified), I grew into adulthood. Lodge concludes How Far Can You Go? with an authorial intrusion to comment on the then-new pope: “a Pole, a poet, a philosopher…a man of the people, a man of destiny, dramatically chosen, instantly popular—but theologically conservative. A changing Church acclaims a Pope who evidently thinks that change has gone far enough. What happens now?” In the fullness of time, that question was answered. The question is being asked anew in the twilight of Francis’s papacy—both by those who think there’s been far too much change and those who think far more is necessary.
“I received many letters from Catholic readers of my own generation endorsing the representative accuracy” of How Far Can You Go?, Lodge reported in his 2018 memoir Writer’s Luck. He didn’t want the book to be political or polemical. He seemed to steer between the opposing poles Thomas Merton was already bemoaning in the 1960s: the “exaggerated and confused enthusiasms” of liberal Catholicism, and the “fanatical, static and inert concept” of the Church that conservatives were intent on preserving. But Lodge never admitted to any consuming belief. In an introduction to the 1993 reissue of The Picturegoers, he says he was an “orthodox practicing Catholic” when he wrote the novel, but “if you were practicing, you were ipso facto orthodox in the 1950s.” On rereading The Picturegoers thirty years after publication, he was surprised by the “prominence” of the religious element and the seriousness with which he had treated the hero’s “conversion,” since he didn’t recall having “any similarly intense spiritual experience” himself.
Yet such a moment apparently awaited. He wrote in 2018 of reading a meditation pamphlet during a long flight in the 1980s, which he said spurred the only genuinely spiritual experience of his life. This “epiphany” (his word) did not fundamentally change him, however. “[T]he foundations of my Catholic faith had always been intellectual, cultural, and familial,” he explained, until he “felt free in old age” to confess his agnosticism. It would have seemed an unlikely destination for someone whose first significant literary project was a tract on Catholic authors (adapted from his college thesis) that bore a seal of approval from the Vatican declaring it free of heresy. On the other hand, the world is forever being resupplied with former believers, young and old, fervid and tepid alike, and Lodge expressed no ill will to the faith he was born into. He conducted himself well over a long literary career, and he merits credit for thinking openly about the meaning of organized religion in his work and his life. There’s much that this generation—orthodox, agnostic, and otherwise—could still gain by reading him.