David Lodge was the son of a dance-band musician who grew up in Brockley, south-east London, an inner suburb not very far from Wells’s Bromley. In 1960 he published his first novel, The Picturegoers, and became a lecturer in English Literature at Birmingham University, which would later appear in his bestselling campus novels lightly disguised as the University of Rummidge. His most influential contribution to H.G. Wells studies came in his first critical book, Language of Fiction (1966), with its close verbal analysis of Tono-Bungay, which he acclaimed as both a unified work of art and a ‘Condition of England novel’ continuing a major Victorian tradition. Soon afterwards he published a more wide-ranging essay marking the centenary of Wells’s birth, ‘Assessing H.G. Wells’. Lodge had become the most influential English critic after his friend Bernard Bergonzi (who taught at the neighbouring University of Warwick) to contribute to the rediscovery of Wells, whose literary reputation was then at its lowest ebb.
Given the long history of antagonism between Wells and his Catholic critics, including Hilaire Belloc and G.K. Chesterton, it is striking that both Bergonzi and Lodge were practising Catholics. For both men, writing about Wells may have been not just a question of literary restitution but an expression of their own move towards a more ecumenical and liberal version of their religion. Lodge’s struggles with the Church’s teachings on sexuality became the subject of one of his most entertaining novels, the proverbially-titled How Far Can You Go? (1980).
In several works of criticism which became a staple of student reading lists, Lodge set out to popularise narrative theory while, on occasion, mediating between the contradictory views of the novelist’s art famously expressed in the quarrel between Wells and Henry James some seventy years earlier. Then, in his later career, he turned to what he called the ‘bio-novel’, writing Author, Author (2004) based on the life of Henry James, and A Man of Parts (2011), his impeccably researched dramatization of an ageing and ailing Wells brooding over his past life and obsessively questioning his actions and motives, above all in his numerous sexual relationships. Wells knows that his time is over, but, as we are reminded on the novel’s final page, he had once glowed ‘like a comet’ in the cultural firmament: ‘Perhaps one day he would glow in the firmament once again.’
David Lodge was a modest and witty companion, who remained devoted to his family and to Birmingham but suffered in his later years from hearing loss. We were delighted when – though he made clear that he was no longer interested in public speaking or attending meetings – he accepted our invitation to become a Vice-President of the H.G. Wells Society. Among his later critical writings was his introduction to the 2005 Penguin Classics edition of Kipps, which he described as ‘probably the funniest of all [Wells’s] novels’ – high praise from one who had himself achieved fame as a master of comic fiction.
Patrick Parrinder