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CHANGING PLACES
David Lodge
A critical paper by
George Downing
April 4, 2000
Changing Places is David Lodge’s hilarious account of an academic exchange program which takes Philip Swallow, an obscure professor of English literature at an obscure red-brick university in England, to Lodge’s comic version of the Berkeley campus, which he renames Euphoric State. It also takes Morris Zapp, his American counterpart, from Berkeley to Swallow’s campus of Rummidge (read Birmingham) University in the dreary industrial midlands of England. Along the way we are treated to Lodge’s wild send-up of academia, sex and marriage, the literary scene and the differences between American and English attitudes and lifestyles. Hardly a single inanity of campus life in the late 1960s escapes Lodge’s deftly-wielded scalpel. Yet he handles all of this with an affectionate and indulgent tone: although he may find his characters foolish and misguided, he nevertheless leaves us with the impression that he genuinely likes them, despite their faults and all-too-human foibles.
Lodge’s two protagonists are cleverly drawn to personify what we have come to assume, rightly or wrongly, are national characteristics of the stereotypical Englishman and American. Philip Swallow is a polite, mild- mannered, diffident fellow, who is introduced to us as a paradigm of the solid family man, devoted to his wife Hilary and their two young children. As a professor of literature he is colorless and unexciting; he has been marking time at Rummidge in a dead-end teaching job, with little hope of a promotion, and is feeling bored and unfulfilled as he leaves for his new adventures in America.
Morris Zapp, by contrast, is a brash, swaggering, funny, lecherous
academic, who has gained a world-wide reputation for being the premier expert on, of all things, the genteel writings of Jane Austen. In a neat little jab at the hypocrisy of the literary world, Lodge lets us in on the fact that Zapp has written five scholarly books on Austen, despite the fact that he personally finds her writing something of a bore. Morris reeks of academic hubris and has been such a relentless womanizer that his tough-talking feminist wife, Desiree, is about to give him the gate.
Lodge takes great fun in contrasting the direct, in-your-face American style of the brilliant and abrasive Zapp with the polite, rather oblique English style of the timid and self-effacing Swallow. His message to the reader seems to be that English academia could use a few more free-wheeling Morris Zapp types, Indeed, in commenting on the character of Zapp in a 1985 interview, Lodge said that “there is a little bit of Morris Zapp in me, I think, and I respond to that witty, abrasive, thrusting Jewish type of American academic. I always feel that life starts to move twice as fast when you’re in their company.”
Lodge also draws amusing parallels between his two faculty wives: Hilary Swallow, as we first meet her, is, like her husband, a model of English rectitude and probity, if a bit dull and humorless – along the lines of the Queen herself. Hers is a very British stiff upper lip, and she seems a shade too practical to be a wholly sympathetic character. After she learns of her husband’s sexual flings in America, she vents her ire by letting him know that she has just spent a bundle on installing central heating in their perpetually damp and cold Rummidge home. As she writes to her husband:
“... I thought to myself, here I am, slaving away, running a house and family single-handed for the sake of my husband’s career and my children’s education, and I’m not even warm while I’m doing it. If he can’t wait for sex til he gets home, why should I wait for central heating? I suppose a more sensual woman would have taken a lover in revenge.”
By these few amusing lines, Lodge suggests to us that whereas spoiled Americans may take their creature comforts for granted, for the more deprived English middle class they are something devoutly to be wished for
- and in the end perhaps even better than sex!
In contrast to the very repressed and correct Hilary Swallow, Desiree Zapp, like her husband, is a tough, no-nonsense American type who seems to have seen it all and done it all. A disillusioned, wise-cracking feminist,
neck. But Swallow pleads with her – he confesses that his marriage to Hilary has gone stale and that he would rather stay in the U.S., taking a new job at Euphoric State and starting a new domestic life with Desiree. Here Lodge, who has often been described as a very Catholic writer, seems to be telling us that however much we would like to reinvent ourselves our moral values continue to cling to us. Though Swallow fancies himself a newly- minted swinger, he remains at the core a thoroughly domesticated creature.
As Swallow frets about the direction of his life in America, Morris Zapp is trying to understand the murky academic goings-on at Rummidge. He is finding all of this very difficult, since for one thing he does not think much of his teaching colleagues and is put off by their distant and chilly British manner. Using Zapp’s very funny reflections on the subject, Lodge conveys to the reader his own misgivings on the fusty ways of his fellow Englishmen and fellow academics.
Notwithstanding Zapp’s feelings, his ineffectual colleagues in the Rummidge English Department fasten on Zapp, whom they had once viewed as brash and overbearing, to be their administrative savior; they have come to admire his take-charge, no-nonsense approach and want him to take over as head of the English Department, to replace another colleague who has gone into a pyschotic nosedive after an American-style protest movement has riled the Rummidge campus.
Meanwhile, on the romantic front, Morris and Hilary Swallow have, inevitably, found their way into one another’s arms, thereby evening out the now-established romance between Philip and Desiree. Morris kindles a new fire in Hilary’s loins, and she goes from prim and decorous housewife to lusty and newly-charged bed partner. And in the process she seems to have tamed the libidinous Morris, who now talks of settling down with Hilary in England and taking the department head post at Rummidge. Whereas Philip has gone from lamb to lion, Morris has gone from lion to lamb!
As the story closes the two couples arrange for a final summit meeting in Manhattan to try to sort out what they should do with their lives. Writing the final chapter of his book in the form of a screenplay, with carefully scripted notes to an imaginary director, Lodge has great fun showing the two couples as they speculate on the various permutations which their relationships might take in the future: one possibility would be mutual divorces and mutual remarriages; another possibility--and here Lodge takes aim at the barnyard quality of sex life in the Swinging Sixties-- would be habitation as a foursome, with any member being free to request
sex from any other member; still another would be mutual divorces, with all four of them going their separate ways.
Cleverly, Lodge uses the device of a movie-style ending to relieve himself of the novelist’s burden of telling how the couples will resolve these questions. Philip comments that a novelist has no choice but to state or at least hint to his readers what the outcome of his story will be, whereas a movie director can choose to end his story whenever he likes, with any scene he pleases, leaving the viewer to guess what will happen to his characters. With that the camera pans in on Philip as he shrugs his shoulders, and the story ends.
When “Changing Places” was published in England in 1975 it became an immediate popular and critical success, winning for Lodge the prestigious Hawthornden Prize as well as the Yorkshire Post Fiction Prize. It also won for Lodge a place as Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature. The book had a similar success in America and introduced American readers for the first time to Lodge’s writing. One American reviewer aptly pointed out that the book combined “John Updike’s precise social observation with Philip Roth’s uproarious humor.” There was almost universal praise on both sides of the Atlantic for Lodge’s witty and graceful writing style and for his inventive technique in telling the story of the two academics and their spouses.
In a clever jab at literary critics who have preconceived notions and formulas on how a novel should be constructed, Lodge has his characters make periodic reference to a musty old book from Swallow’s collection entitled “Let’s Write a Novel.” From time to time he or Hilary read excerpts from this tome which enjoin the would-be novel writer to avoid such devices as confusing flashbacks or an outdated epistolary style of story- telling. Then, of course, Lodge deliberately ignores these “rules” and proceeds to use flashbacks and exchanges of letters to tell his story – often to hilarious effect.
In my view, the exchanges of letters are especially effective and amusing, giving Lodge an opportunity to give an authentically unique and personal voice to each of his four principal characters. The letters which Desiree writes to Morris, for example, are priceless accounts of the liberated lifestyle she is now reveling in with Morris finally off her back. Lodge reveals a real genius for the American idiom in these wonderfully funny letters. He captures perfectly the cynical and worldly tone of the liberated woman who has discovered that she can live quite happily without benefit of a philandering spouse.
