Thirty years ago, every American academic going on a research trip or a sabbatical to England carried a copy of David Lodge’s comic classic, Changing Places (1975), which told a tale of two 40-year-old professors of English literature and two embattled campuses in the eventful spring of 1969. An ineffectual British academic, Philip Swallow, from the University of Rummidge (think Birmingham), and a hotshot American star, Morris Zapp, from the State University of Euphoria (a fictional state between Northern and Southern California), in Plotinus (Berkeley), switch places for a six-month exchange of offices, courses, and even wives. Both are transformed by the experience, and since the women’s-liberation movement is just beginning (the Plotinus Gazette announces its first demonstration, for free child-care centers), the wives are changing, too, in ways none of the characters can foresee or control.
Decades later, Lodge is now writing about an aging academic who must come to terms with deafness (Deaf Sentence, already published in Britain and soon out in the United States). But the interesting question about his best-known novel is whether the places are still the same, and academics would still like to exchange them. What has happened to David Lodge’s educational landscape after 33 years? In the novel, Swallow seems to have the better of the deal. Arrested and briefly jailed in a demonstration, he emerges a folk hero. A lover of literature with no special period or field who has published little, taught tutorials, and enjoyed constructing examinations, he had job security in England, but low pay. Life at Euphoria, with its luxuries and pleasures, overwhelms him, and he comes to see himself as part of a new cultural avant-garde, “a reversal of that cultural Gulf Stream which had in the past swept so many Americans to Europe in search of Experience.” For the first time, he feels as if Whitman, Melville, Twain, and Crane are speaking directly to him, with all of Whitman’s “yea-saying heterogeneity.”
In contrast, Zapp seems to have suffered a decline in fortune. He is used to being a yea-sayer, a wheeler-dealer, a fast-tracker, and a winner. As an American academic, Lodge writes, Zapp “has invested so much time and money in the process” of being trained “that any career other than an academic one has become unthinkable, and anything less than success in it unbearable. He is well-primed, in short, to enter a profession as steeped in the spirit of free enterprise as Wall Street.” A specialist in Jane Austen, he has disdained the naïve American tourists who reverently visit British shrines of great authors. In fact, he credits “never having set foot” in England for his intellectual freedom and critical pizazz. The “public affluence and private squalor” of British academic life strikes him as barely tolerable. But to his surprise, he sees a “new American frontier” rising in Rummidge. Sated with West Coast triumphs, he realizes that being Head of Department at a provincial English university actually offers “a Napoleonic future” for a man “with energy and ideas.” But he doesn’t take the chance.
In reality, Britain in 1969 was not quite so dismal in terms of academic excitement, commercial hustle, or popular culture as Lodge paints it. Freddie Laker had started low-cost trans-Atlantic flights; an adventurous British schoolboy, Richard Branson, had begun to publish a magazine called The Student; and a clever young American, William Jefferson Clinton, was a Rhodes Scholar at Oxford. The Beatles were still wildly popular, and even in Birmingham, heavy-metal rock was having its start with Judas Priest. British salaries were low, but the exchange rate for the pound was about $2.50, and in any case, American academic visitors were not big spenders.
Academic travel to Britain is very different for Americans today. British salaries are much higher than they used to be, London is one of the most expensive cities in the world, and the exchange rate makes even American professors used to living large cut back. In the 1970s, when we took our young family to London on sabbatical, we lived in Kensington; these days, an American professor is lucky to find affordable housing in Tooting Bec. Even the cab driver who took me on the ruinous journey from Heathrow into London recently told me he had just had his wedding on Cape Cod, because he found it so charming, quaint, and cheap. In the era of Gordon Ramsey, Jamie Oliver, and Heston Blumenthal, the term “British chef” is no longer a laughable oxymoron, and even a cup of tea is no bargain.
Universities have changed as well. In Scenes of Academic Life (2005), Lodge ruefully noted that “Changing Places … now seems like a historical novel. Its comedy is largely based on differences between academic life in England and in America, many of which no longer obtain. The two systems have drawn closer together: American universities have become less euphoric places, English universities more competitive, as have the countries to which they belong.”
British higher education has expanded and Americanized in its structures and curriculum, and what is known as the RAE (Research Assessment Exercise), imposed by the Thatcher government in 1986, carries out an exhaustive study of faculty research productivity in every department of every institution of higher education in Britain. It’s a jungle out there in the Midlands. As Lodge notes, “the amusing unproductive eccentrics” who once found “a comfortable home” in British universities have long retired to the Costa Brava. Today, British professors are more likely to be publishing annual books with university presses and writing weekly columns for The Guardian than conducting one-on-one tutorials.
Oxford and Cambridge have hired Ivy League administrators to help stage huge alumni fund-raising drives. At the same time, the centralization of higher education means that professors in Britain are expected to teach well and are offered government-supported programs in pedagogy, course-planning, and even techniques of stand-up comedy for lecturers. A Morris Zapp in Birmingham in 2008 would have less zip, while a Philip Swallow in Berkeley would be much more savvy.
To be sure, the cultural relationship between Britain and America has changed before. For a long time, the American literary tourist in the Old World was an awed and humbled pilgrim. “An American has more reasons than another to draw him to Britain,” Emerson conceded in 1833. “Every book we read, every biography, play, romance, in whatever form, is still English history and manners.” The expat Henry James believed that Americans had an innate respect for British culture, and that the British themselves did not appreciate their country sufficiently. Nor did American literature get much respect in Britain. As The Times Literary Supplement noted in 1954, that literature had long been regarded as “a kind of spasm, an involuntary turbulence.”
But the tide seemed to change in the 1960s, with American literature, especially the novel, appearing much more exciting, rewarding, and innovative than its British equivalents. Martin Amis spoke for a generation of British writers when he told an interviewer in 2000 that “19th-century England was the time of our big novels, our center of the world novels, our time of imperial confidence. That has shifted to America, and I cold-bloodedly and selfishly think, I want some of that.”
Now the pendulum, the power, and the money have swung back again in the direction of Britain. By the 1980s, British literature was beginning to acknowledge not only Americans, but a diverse group of Anglophone writers from Australia, Canada, India, and South Africa as sources of inspiration and ambition. At the same time, America’s literary confidence has been waning with the nation’s imperial confidence. Can there still be a Great American Novel, or has the short story displaced it? In the 21st century, professors are very aware of anti-Americanism throughout the world, but less aware of the hostility to American writing and the criticism of its provinciality. If we had a Great American Novel prize, the leading candidate might be a British novelist living in New York.
Could there be a novel like Changing Places today? I doubt it. Swallow and Zapp would have to switch power positions, with the American a defensive, cash-strapped refugee from the culture wars and the job markets, and the Brit a smooth-talking, media-savvy, pound-wealthy, RAE-hardened literary entrepreneur.
I can imagine many variants of the story, and I would enjoy seeing it told about female faculty members, but I have trouble imagining an American academic, male or female, expressing cultural insecurities or so candidly or so openly longing for change, as Lodge depicted in 1975. Indeed, many Americans still believe in the comforting narrative of Anglo-American higher education as Rummidge and Euphoria. They are in for a big surprise.
Elaine Showalter is an emerita professor of English at Princeton University. Her book A Jury of Her Peers: A Literary History of American Women Writers 1650-2000 will be published by Alfred A. Knopf in 2009.
http://chronicle.com Section: The Chronicle Review Volume 55, Issue 3, Page B4
