David Lodge - Small World (12 page)

“Ironic, too, isn’t it, when you think of how we met? At first I felt horribly guilty, as if I had somehow passed on to her a death which I had narrowly escaped myself. I convinced myself that it was just superstition. But I shall always keep a little shrine to Joy in my heart.”

“A little what?”

“A shrine,” Philip said solemnly. Morris coughed cigar smoke and let it pass. “She gave me back an appetite for life I thought I had lost for ever. It was the total unexpectedness, the gratuitousness of that giving of herself. It convinced me that life was still worth living, that I should make the most of what I had left.”

“And have you had any more adventures like that one?” Morris enquired, feeling slightly piqued at the extent to which he had been affected, first by the eroticism of Philip’s tale, then by its sad epilogue.

Philip blushed slightly. “One thing I learned from it, was never to say no to someone who asks for your body, never reject someone who freely offers you theirs.”

“I see,” said Morris drily. “Have you agreed this code with Hilary?”

“Hilary and I don’t see eye to eye on a lot of things. Some more whisky?”

“Positively the last one. I have to get up at five tomorrow.”

“And what about you, Morris?” said Philip, pouring out the whisky. “How’s your sex life these days?”

“Well, after Désirée and I split up I tried to get married again. I had various women living in, graduate students mostly, but none of them would marry me—girls these days have no principles—and I gradually lost interest in the idea. I’m living on my own right now. I jog. I watch TV. I write my books. Sometimes I go to a massage parlour in Esseph.”

“A massage parlour?” Philip looked shocked.

“They have a very nice class of girl in those places, you know. They’re not hookers. Collegeeducated. Clean, well-groomed, articulate. When I was a teenager I spent many exhausting hours trying to persuade girls like that to jerk me off in the back seat of my old man’s Chevvy. Now it’s as easy as going to the supermarket. It saves a lot of time and nervous energy.”

“But there’s no relationship!”

“Relationships kill sex, haven’t you learned that yet? The longer a relationship goes on, the less sexual excitement there is. Don’t kid yourself, Philip—do you think it would have been as great with Joy the second time, if there’d been one?”

“Yes,” said Philip. “Yes.”

“And the twenty-second time? The two hundredth time?”

“I suppose not,” Philip admitted. “Habit ruins everything in the end, doesn’t it? Perhaps that’s what we’re all looking for—desire undiluted by habit.”

“The Russian Formalists had a word for it,” said Morris.

“I’m sure they did,” said Philip. “But it’s no use telling me what it was, because I’m sure to forget it.”

“
Ostranenie
,” said Morris. “Defamiliarization. It was what they thought literature was all about. ‘Habit devours objects, clothes, furniture, one’s wife and the fear of war… Art exists to help us recover the sensation of life.’ Viktor Shklovsky.”

“Books used to satisfy me,” said Philip. “But as I get older I find they aren’t enough.”

“But you’re hitting the trail again soon, eh? Hilary tells me Turkey. What are you doing there?”

“Another British Council tour. I’m lecturing on Hazlitt.”

“Are they very interested in Hazlitt in Turkey?”

“I shouldn’t think so, but it’s the bicentenary of his birth. Or rather, it was, last year, when this trip was first mooted. It’s taken rather a long time to get off the ground… By the way, did you receive a copy of my Hazlitt book?”

“No—I was just saying to Hilary, I hadn’t even heard about it.”

Philip uttered an exclamation of annoyance. “Isn’t that typical of publishers? I specifically asked them to send you a complimentary copy. Let me give you one now.” He took from the bookcase a volume in a pale blue wrapper, scribbled a dedication inside, and handed it to Morris. It was entitled
Hazlitt and the Amateur Reader
. “I don’t expect you to agree with it, Morris, but if you think it has any merit at all, I’d be very grateful if you could do anything to get it reviewed somewhere. It hasn’t had a single notice, so far.”

“It doesn’t look like the sort of thing
Metacriticism
is interested in,” said Morris. “But I’ll see what I can do.” He riffled through the pages. “Hazlitt is kind of an unfashionable subject, isn’t he?”

“Unjustly neglected, in my view,” said Philip. “A very interesting man. Have you read
Liber Amoris?
”

“I don’t think so.”

“It’s a lightly fictionalized account of his obsession with his landlady’s daughter. He was estranged from his wife at the time, hoping rather vainly to get a divorce. She was the archetypal pricktease. Would sit on his knee and let him feel her up, but not sleep with him or promise to marry him when he was free. It nearly drove him insane. He was totally obsessed. Then one day he saw her out with another man. End of illusion. Hazlitt shattered. I can feel for him. That girl must have—”

Philip’s voice faltered, and Morris saw him turn pale, staring at the living-room door. Following the direction of his gaze, Morris saw Hilary standing at the threshold, wearing a faded blue velour dressing-gown, with a hood and a zip that ran from throat to hem.

“I couldn’t sleep,” she said. “Then I realized I’d forgotten to tell you not to lock the front door. Matthew isn’t in yet. Are you feeling all right, Philip? You look as if you’d seen a ghost.”

“That dressing-gown…”

“What about it? I dug it out because my other one’s at the cleaners.”

“Oh, nothing, I thought you’d got rid of it years ago,” said Philip.

He drained his glass. “Time for bed, I think.”

Part II

AT 5 a.m., precisely, Morris Zapp is woken by the bleeping of his digital wristwatch, a sophisticated piece of miniaturized technology which can inform him, at the touch of a button, of the exact time anywhere in the world. In Cooktown, Queensland, Australia, for instance, it is 3 p.m., a fact of no interest to Morris Zapp, as he yawns and gropes for the bedside lamp switch—though as it happens, at this very moment in Cooktown, Queensland, Rodney Wainwright, of the University of North Queensland, is labouring over a paper for Morris Zapp’s Jerusalem conference on the Future of Criticism.

It is hot, very hot, this afternoon, in North Queensland; sweat makes the ballpen in Rodney Wainwright’s fingers slippery to hold, and dampens the page where the cushion of his palm rests upon it. From his desk in the study of his one-storey house here on the steamy outskirts of Cooktown, Rodney Wainwright can hear the sounds of the waves breaking on the nearby beach. There, he knows, are most of his students in English 351, “Theories of Literature from Coleridge to Barthes”, cleaving the blue and white water or lying prone on the dazzling sand, the girls with their bikini bra straps trailing, untied for an even tan. Rodney Wainwright knows they are there because this morning, after the class broke up, they invited him to join them, grinning and nudging each other, a friendly but challenging gesture which, being decoded, meant: “OK, we’ve played your cultural game this morning—are you willing to play ours this afternoon?”

“Sorry,” he had said, “There’s nothing I’d like more, but I have this paper to write.” Now they are on the beach and he is at his desk. Later, as the sun sinks behind their backs, they will break out cans of beer and light a barbecue fire and someone will pick out a tune on a guitar. When it is quite dark there may be a proposal to go swimming in the nude—Rodney Wainwright has heard rumours that this is the usual climax to a beach party. He imagines the participation in such exercise of Sandra Dix, the buxom blonde from England who always sits in the front row of English 351 with her mouth and blouse-front perpetually agape. Then, with a sigh, he focuses his vision on the ruled foolscap before him, and re-reads what he wrote ten minutes ago.

The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism maintain its Arnoldian function of identifying the best which has been thought and said, when literary discourse itself has been decentred by deconstructing the traditional concept of the author, of authority?

Rodney Wainwright inserts a pair of inverted commas around “authority” and wills his mind to think of the next sentence. The paper must be finished soon, for Morris Zapp has asked to see a draft before accepting it for the conference, and on acceptance depends the travel grant which will enable Rodney Wainwright to fly to Europe this summer (or rather winter), to refresh his mind at the fountainhead of modern critical thought, making useful and influential contacts, adding to the little pile of scholarly honours, distinctions, achievements, that may eventually earn him a chair at Sydney or Melbourne. He does not want to grow old in Cooktown, Queensland. It is no country for old men. Even now, at thirty-eight, he stands no chance with the likes of Sandra Dix beside the bronzed and bulging heroes of the beach. The effects of twenty years’ dedication to the life of the mind are all too evident when he puts on a pair of swimming trunks, however loosely cut: beneath the large, balding, bespectacled head is a pale, pear-shaped torso, with skinny limbs attached like afterthoughts in a child’s drawing. And even if by some miracle Sandra Dix should be inclined to overlook these imperfections of the flesh in the dazzled contemplation of his mind, his wife Beverley would soon put a stop to any attempt at friendship beyond the call of tutorial duty.

As if to reinforce his thought, Bev’s broad bum, inadequately disguised by an ethnic print frock, now intrudes into the frame of Rodney Wainwright’s abstracted vision. Bent nearly double, and sweating profusely under her floppy sunhat, she is shuffling backwards across the rank lawn, dragging something—what? A hosepipe? A rope? Some animal on a lead? Eventually it proves to be a child’s toy, some brightly coloured wheeled object that wags and oscillates obscenely as it moves along, followed by a gurgling toddler, child of some visiting neighbour. A strong-minded woman, Bev. Rodney Wainwright regards her bottom with respect, but without desire. He imagines Sandra Dix executing the same movement in her blue jeans, and sighs. He forces his eyes back on to the ruled foolscap before him.

“One possible solution,” he writes, and then pauses, gnawing the end of his ballpen.

One possible solution would be to run to the beach, seize Sandra Dix by the hand, drag her behind a sand dune, pull down her bikini pants and “Cuppa tea, Rod? I’m just going to make one for Meg and me.”

Bev’s red perspiring face peers in at the open window. Rodney stops writing and guiltily covers his pad. After she has gone, he rips out the page, tears it up into small pieces, and tosses it into the wastepaper basket, where it joins several other torn and screwed-up pieces of paper. He starts again on a clean sheet.

The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism…

Morris Zapp, who has nodded off these last few minutes, suddenly wakes again in a flurry of panic, but, examining the illuminated face of his digital watch, is relieved to discover that it is only 5:15. He gets out of bed, scratching himself and shivering slightly (the Swallows, with typical British parsimony, switch off the central beating at night), pulls on a bathrobe and pads softly across the landing to the bathroom. He tugs at the lightcord just inside the door and flinches as blinding fluorescent light pings and ricochets off white and yellow tiles. He micturates, washes his hands, and puts out his tongue at the mirror above the handbasin. It resembles, this tongue, the dried-out bed of a badly polluted river. Too much alcohol and too many cigars last night. And every night.

This is a low point in the day of the globe-trotting academic, when he must wrench himself from sleep, and rise alone in the dark to catch his early plane; staring at his coated tongue in the mirror, rubbing red-rimmed eyes, fingering the stubble on his jowls, he wonders momentarily why he is doing it, whether the game is worth the candle. To shake off these depressing thoughts, Morris Zapp decides to take a quick shower, and too bad if the whining and shuddering of the water pipes wakes his hosts. He whines and shudders himself in some degree, since the water is barely tepid, but the effect of the shower is invigorating. His worldwide traveller’s razor, designed to operate on all known electric currents, and if need be on its own batteries, hums, and Morris Zapp’s brain begins to hum too. He glances at his watch again: 5.30. The taxi has been ordered for six, time enough for him to fix himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen downstairs. He will breakfast at Heathrow while he waits for his connection to Milan.

Three thousand miles to the west, at Helicon, New Hampshire, a writers’ colony hidden deep in a pine forest, Morris Zapp’s ex-wife, Désirée, tosses restlessly in bed. It is 12.30, and she has been awake since retiring an hour earlier. This is, she knows, because she is anxious about the previous day’s work. A thousand words she managed to write in one of the little cabins in the woods to which, each morning, the resident writers repair with their lunch pails and thermos flasks, to lock themselves away with their respective muses; and she came back to the main house in the late afternoon exhilarated by this exceptional achievement. But as she chatted with the other writers and artists in the course of the evening, over dinner, in front of the TV, across the ping-pong table, tiny doubts began to assail her about those thousand words. Were they the right, the only possible words? She resisted the urge to rush upstairs to her room to read them through again. The routine at Helicon is strict, almost monastic: the days are for silent, solitary wrestling with the creative act; the evenings for sociability, conversation, relaxation. Désirée promised herself she would not look at her manuscript before she went to bed, but let it lie till morning, let the first minutes of the next day be reserved for the purpose—the longer she left it the more likely she was to forget what she had written, the more likely therefore that she would be able to read herself with something like an objective eye, to feel, without anticipating it, the shock of recognition she hoped to evoke in her readers.

She went to bed at 11.30, with her eyes consciously averted from the orange folder, lying on top of the pine chest, which contained the precious thousand words. But it seemed to glow in the dark—even now, with her eyes closed, she can feel its presence, like a pulsing source of radioactivity. It is part of a book that Désirée has been trying to write for the past four years, a book combining fiction and nonfiction—fantasy, criticism, confession and speculation; a book entitled, simply,
Men
. Each section has at its head a well-known proverb or aphorism about women in which the key-word has been replaced by “man” or “men”. She has already written, “Frailty Thy Name Is Man”, “No Fury Like A Man Scorned” and “Wicked Men Bother One. Good Men Bore One. That Is The Only Difference Between Them.” Presently she is working on the inversion of Freud’s celebrated cry of bafflement: “What Does A Man Want?” The Answer, according to Désirée is, “Everything—and then some.”

Désirée turns on to her stomach and kicks impatiently at the skirt of the nightdress, which has gotten entangled round her legs with all her twisting and turning. She wonders whether to try and relax with the help of her vibrator, but it is an instrument she uses, as a nun her discipline, more out of principle than real enthusiasm, and besides, the battery is nearly flat, it might run out of juice before she reached her climax, just like a man—hey, that’s quite good! She switches on the lamp on the night-table and scrawls in the little notebook she keeps always within reach: “Vibrator with flat battery just like a man.” Out of I he corner of her eye she can see the orange folder burning into the varnished wood of the chest. She turns out the light, but now she is wide awake, it is hopeless, there is nothing to be done but to take a sleeping pill, though it will make her sluggish for the first couple of hours in the morning. She turns on the night-table lamp again. Now where are the pills? Oh yes, on the chest, next to the manuscript. Perhaps if she allows herself one tiny peep, just one sentence to go to sleep on…

Standing at the chest in her bare feet, with a sleeping tablet in one hand, arrested halfway to her mouth, Désirée opens the folder and begins to read. Before she knows it, she has come to the end of the three typed pages, swallowed them in three greedy gulps. She can hardly believe that the words which it cost her so many hours and so much effort to find and weld together could be consumed so quickly; or that they could seem so vague, so tentative, so uncertain of themselves. It will all have to be rewritten tomorrow. She swallows a pill, then a second, wanting only oblivion now. Waiting for the pills to do their work, she stands at the window and looks out at the tree-covered hills which surround the writers’ colony, a monotonous, monochrome landscape in the cold light of the moon. Trees as far as the eye can see. Enough trees to make a million and a half paperback copies of
Men
. Two million. “Grow, trees, grow!” Désirée whispers. She refuses to admit the possibility of defeat. She returns to the bed and lies stiffly on her back, her eyes closed, her arms at her side, waiting for sleep.

Morris Zapp returns to the guest bedroom, dresses himself comfortably for travelling—corduroy pants, white cotton polo-neck, sports jacket—closes and locks the suitcase he had packed the night before, checks the closet and drawers for any stray belongings, pats various pockets to confirm the presence of his life-support system: billfold, passport, tickets, pens, spectacles, cigars. He tiptoes, as far as it is possible for a man carrying a heavy suitcase to tiptoe, across the landing, and carefully descends the stairs, each tread of which creaks under his weight. He puts the case down beside the front door and glances at his watch again .5.45.

Far out above the cold North Atlantic ocean, aboard TWA Flight 072. from Chicago to London, time suddenly jumps from 2.45 to 3.45, as the Lockheed Tristar slips through the invisible interface between two time-zones. Few of the three hundred and twenty-three souls aboard are aware of the change. Most of them still have their watches adjusted to Chicago local time, where it is 11.45 p.m. on the previous day, and anyway most of them are asleep or trying to sleep. Aperitifs and dinner have been served, the movie has been shown, duty-free liquor and cigarettes dispensed to those desirous of purchasing them. The cabin crew, weary from the performance of these tasks, are clustered round the galleys, quietly gossiping as they check their stocks and takings. The refrigerated cabinets, the microwave ovens and electric urns, which were full when the aircraft took off from O’Hare airport, are now empty. Most of the food and drink they contained is now in the passengers’ bellies, and before they land at Heathrow much of it will be in the septic tanks in the aircraft’s belly.

The main lights in the passenger section, doused for the showing of the film, have not been switched on again. The passengers, replete, and in many cases sozzled, sleep uneasily. They slump and twist in their seats, trying vainly to arrange their bodies in a horizontal position, their heads loll on their shoulders as if they have been garrotted, their mouths gape in foolish smiles or ugly sneers. A few passengers, unable to sleep, are listening to recorded music on stereophonic headphones, or even reading, in the narrow beams of the tiny spotlights artfully angled in the cabin ceiling for that purpose; reading books about sex and adventure by Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins and Jack Higgins, thick paperbacks with gaudy covers bought from the bookstalls at O’Hare. Only one reader has a hardback book on her lap, and actually seems to be making notes as she reads. She sits erect, alert, in a window seat in row 16 in the Ambassador class. Her face is in shadow, but looks handsome, aristocratic, in profile, like a face on an old medallion, with a high, noble brow, a haughty Roman nose, and a determined mouth and chin. In the pool of light shed onto her lap, an exquisitely manicured hand guides a slender gold-plated propelling pencil across the lines of print, occasionally pausing to underline a sentence or make a marginal note. The long, spear-shaped fingernails on the hand are lacquered with terracotta varnish. The hand itself, long and white and slender, looks almost weighed down with three antique rings in which are set ruby, sapphire and emerald stones. At the wrist there is a chunky gold bracelet and the hint of a cream silk shirt-cuff nestling inside the sleeve of a brown velvet jacket. The reader’s legs are clothed in generously cut knickerbockers of the smile soft material, terminating just below the knee. Her calves are sheathed in cream-coloured textured hose and her feet in kidskin slippers which have replaced, for the duration of the flight, a pair of high-heeled fashion boots made of cream leather, engraved, under fie instep, with the name of an exclusive Milanese maker of custom footwear. The lacquered nails flash in the beam of the reading lamp is a page is crisply turned, flattened and smoothed, and the slender gold pencil continues its steady traversing of the page. The heading at the top of the page is “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” and the title on the spine is
Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays
, an English translation of a book by the French political philosopher, Louis Althusser. The marginal notes are in Italian. Fulvia Morgana, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Padua, is at work. She cannot sleep in airplanes, and does not believe in wasting time.