The Cliches of David Lodge

James Wood is never more entertaining than when he intensely dislikes a book, and he intensely dislikes David Lodge’s widely reviewed, Author, Author , a fictionalized biography of Henry James. After savaging the opening paragraph of Lodge’s novel, he goes on to list some of Lodge’s cliches: “We encounter Henry James, dictating to his secretary in Lamb House, pacing up and down the Garden Room: ‘he racked his brains for le mot juste.’ (It is cruel that a sentence about le mot juste should be violated by precisely its opposite ?Ethe cliche ‘he racked his brains.’) George Du Maurier, we learn, has ‘a mop of soft wavy hair.’ Ah, a mop! Constance Fenimore Woolson onlyonce ‘put a foot wrong’ in her correspondence with James. Later she will heap praise on The Portrait of a Lady , and smooth ‘his slightly ruffled authorial wings.’ Edward Compton, one of the actor-managers with whom James does business, is ‘as bald as an egg.’ William James, traveling to England fro the opening of Henry’s play, is described thus: ‘He came trailing clouds of glory himself, for his monumental Principles of Psychology, which had finally appeared the year before, was gathering plaudits from all over the world.’ (Clouds of glory and plaudits in one sentence; be thankful that ‘kudos’ is not also there.) James is seen as plunding into ‘the unfamiliar and murky waters of the theatre,’ only later to have drunk ‘the heady wine of theatrical success.’ He ‘dashes off’ a letter. James’s manservant ‘stroked his moustache thoughtfully.’ Certain theme in James’s work are ‘more grist to Fenimore’s mill.’ And so on.”

For writers who do not possess rich gifts of originality, two options present themselves: Austen’s choice, which is to avoid metaphor as much as possible so as to avoid dead metaphor; or Wodehouse’s (postmodern) choice, which is to use dead metaphor only within winking quotation marks. Those, or run the risk of incurring the scorn of James Wood.