by James Wood
“Tom, is there any way, any way at all that you could combine the Book, what did you call it?”
“The Book Against God, or some title like that,” I said shyly.
“Well, is there any way you could combine this Book Against God with your work on the Ph.D.?” Jane continued to look alarmed.
“But you’re treating this as if I have been working for months and months on the Book Against God! It’s just a mental distraction, I’m telling you. It’s something that I can see getting in the way of the Ph.D. in the months to come. A potential risk, that’s all. And to answer your question, no, there’s no chance of combining them, even if I wanted to. The Ph.D. is very very focused and the other is very very broad.”
“But you just said to me that you were feeling fainthearted about the Ph.D. You said that. That was the word you used.”
“Yes, a figure of speech. I don’t really feel fainthearted at all. It’s just that sometimes it’s a bit hard for me to concentrate on it, and this last month—well, for the whole bloody month they’ve been taking up the road outside, as you know, and it’s quite hard to apply myself when they get going with the drills and everything. The windows almost rattle! And then I get easily distracted by thinking about this new Book Against God. And I haven’t felt very well in the last week, as you also know. Bad headaches. Very bad indeed, actually. But I really have been working quite hard on the Ph.D.”
“I’m sorry about the headaches. Tom, you’ve been working on the Ph.D. for how long now?”
“Well, six years I suppose.”
“Seven in fact, I think.”
“Seven, all right. Yes, seven.”
“And we’ve known each other for nearly five of those years. And your promises have come and gone like the seasons. Your Ph.D. has already seen Mrs. Thatcher off, and it’ll probably see Mrs. Thatcher’s successor off, too. For all I know you’ll still be at it when a Labour government gets in.”
“When universal socialism is declared in our land and the lamb lies down with the lion,” I murmured.
“I’m glad you find it funny. But if you can’t finish the Ph.D., if you know that you will never finish it, then for God’s sake get rid of it, and do something with your life. With our life. You know, darling, it’s not, it’s not … very manly to have you sitting round all day in your pajamas. I’m sorry.
I thought that a very low blow. But I was silent.
“I’m sorry, but that is how I feel,” she continued. “That is how you make me feel.”
Despite appearances, all this was said quite lightly, and I didn’t trouble myself too much. By taking a light tone, I forced Jane to moderate her gravity. And then two days later I was called by my mother, and events in Sundershall took precedence. I wish now that I had attended to that strange look of pure panic that consumed Jane’s face when I told her about the BAG. Pure panic! In that fear lay everything that was to come. I suppose she felt she had suddenly been given powers of prophecy; she could see that the BAG was not going to go away. And in all likelihood, she didn’t believe me when I said that I had not been working on it. Obviously, she couldn’t have known about the “four notebooks,” but she probably had a good idea of what I had been up to. I know this now, but chose not to know it then.
When I think of the last few months of our marriage, I see Jane in my mind’s eye, always angry with me, and always practising the piano. I haven’t denied that I was difficult to live with, not least because my need to work on the Ph.D. (or BAG) meant that I was always at home filling the place with cigarette smoke. But this happy life had worked as long as Jane went out to Trinity. My understanding was that she practised there precisely so that we wouldn’t be together all day in Islington. Suddenly, however, she deliberately stopped practising at Trinity, and began to insist on playing the piano at home. After my return from Sundershall, Jane somehow transformed herself into someone who went out only to teach—three afternoons a week. I suppose that while I was in the north she had got used to staying at home and playing the Steinway baby grand that filled our sitting room. And once I had returned, she was not going to adjust her regime. She wanted to stay at home.
A strange exchange seemed to take place in our marriage. She would not say anything about my dirtiness, my dressing gown (which she once tried to throw out of our bathroom window), my unchanged clothes, the beard clouding my face, the anarchy of books by my bedside, and the indirection of my reading. But in return, she just ignored me, and instead practised and practised on that damn piano until the sound of those nodding felt hammers drove me out of the house. And I should say that it was a certain kind of practising that was making it impossible for me to work. Complicated music I can shut out of my mind; it means little to me. Certainly, I understood Jane’s need for hard work last September and October; she was practising for an important concert with a well-known string ensemble, and she was very anxious about it. But she seemed to be repeating what sounded like a rather easy passage on the piano, playing it once, twice, three times, then again and again for what must have been an hour, with such fearless will and fierce commitment that to hear it almost made me weep with frustration at my own weakness. “Commit a sin twice and it will not seem a sin,” goes a Russian saying. But what about four hundred and forty times? Will it not seem a sin then? I felt that Jane’s endless repetitions at the piano were a way of punishing me for my lack of application, for my inability precisely to repeat and repeat and repeat, to “stick at it.”
When it comes to music, my powers of “neutralizing” are ineffective. I discovered the neutralizing technique while flying to Rome on our honeymoon. I’m a nervous and infrequent flier, especially jittery when the plane meets air turbulence. But this time I was walking back to my seat from the lavatory when the plane violently dropped and I tripped and fell halfway to the floor. As I stood up and continued to my seat, I realized that I was not nervous. This was surely, I reflected (becoming “philosophical,” as Jane would have it), because I had been turbulent at the same time as the plane and had cancelled out the plane’s turbulence by equalling it. Of course, there’s no need actually to fall on the floor: once seated, as the plane continued to shake and dip, I experimented by gently rocking in my flimsy seat from side to side, and I found I was unaware that the plane was moving at all, because I was rocking with it.
I’ve expanded this “neutralizing” principle elsewhere: I smoke a cigarette in smoky rooms, if I can; I eat food if I have indigestion. A real success was scored with my insomnia—until recently, while I have been writing the last stages of this account. Instead of trying to think sleepy or lulling thoughts, I deliberately set my mind ablaze with random nagging contemplations. Now, the logical response to Jane’s piano playing would have been to “neutralize” it by making music of my own, perhaps by humming something. But I have a terrible voice, and can’t keep a tune anyway, and unlike smoking, thinking, eating, or moving, singing does not feel like a natural activity to me. So I lay on the bed and tried to read, as the music sounded around me, and I tried not to let my feelings blacken. And then I took my books and went out, to find a library or quiet café.
11
MAX CALLED ME as soon as I got back to London from seeing my father. He adored Father—who adored him in return—and he wanted to hear my impression of his health. So I took a cab to Ladbroke Grove, despite Jane’s insistence that we couldn’t now afford such luxuries.
He was not wearing his spectacles when he opened the door to me, and his reduced eyes made me squint. Max “looks like a man in three acts,” as Peter used to describe him. His head is rather narrow, his shoulders of average width, and his pelvis quite broad. The heavy, broad-based body suited him when, as a teenager, he liked to pose as the real sceptic, the slayer of fraudulent emotion and slack thought. On Pilgrim’s Path, during meetings of our grandly named Pitmatic Philosophical Society, Max used to narrow his bespectacled eyes as he lit a Dunhill, and seemed to smother untruths by slumping over them. I can still see h
im in my mind, seventeen years old, heavily sagging under the oak tree and saying to me, “Is that true? Can you verify it?”
Just as Colin and Belinda think fit to serve tea from a Thermos, so Max, who resembles his parents more than he knows, presents the strangest food at his flat. Naturally, the only alcohol he had available, when I arrived, was a deformed plastic flagon of ouzo and a bottle of Domecq amontillado. I sat in his kitchen as he blundered good-naturedly among his cupboards, emerging at last with a plate of crackers and a huge tube of Primula cheese spread, lain alongside the crackers with apparent dignity like a sceptre.
“Stop, stop! Why don’t we just cut our losses and go round the corner to the pub?”
“Why?” asked Max, in obvious bewilderment. I took pity on him, and gently lied.
“I need whisky, that’s why. I’ve been in Sundershall—army rations as far as drink goes.”
“That’s fine, then. I need cigarettes.” Max used to drink alcohol when we were younger; now he feeds mainly off coffee and Coke. I sometimes think that the only thing Max is worldly about is tobacco; he is still loyal to Dunhills. The broad packet, rosette-red on the outside with icon-gold innards, so that the box always glows like a medal, obviously still pleases him.
We walked down Max’s street and turned onto Ladbroke Grove, which was mad with people, most of them menacing.
“It’s a while since I’ve been here,” I said.
“The atmosphere is always … basically a race riot just beginning or ending.”
“Max, are you quoting yourself?”
“Not … yet,” he said brightly.
Max speaks frustratingly slowly. It’s not halting speech, because he has such a clear idea of where he is going; he is simply being very careful with language. I used to love his earnest, slightly showy silences—he is a terrible exhibitionist in his quiet way—when we were teenagers: Max, measuring out words as he measured out everything, sagely, intelligently. But nowadays his portly intermissions seem controlling, a way of keeping his audience in the theatre. I have to struggle neither to complete his sentences nor to bridle at his reticent authority.
“This is an amazingly grim place,” I shouted—we were entering a crowded pub. Even to a smoker it seemed deadly: the thick air was a hanging traffic of grey, produced, it seemed, by every single human in the room.
“Why?” asked Max, blinking.
“Well, is there anyone in this pub not smoking? It’s like the entire French nation on a night out.”
“I’ve never noticed,” said Max. “It’s where I get my cigarettes, that’s all. But, Tom, you don’t like pubs anyway. You’ve grown pub-phobic. Living with Karl for all those years … did that to you. They’re too proletarian for you, too easy. The juvenility of beer is offensive to you, you only like bottles with … years on them.”
“I do like pubs,” I said, as we made our way to the only free table, “I just don’t like beer.”
“Well, today was a column day for me and I have earned my pint.”
“What was it about today?”
“Boring stuff. A piece about how we’re no longer inventive as a nation. Blah, blah. You’ve read it a hundred times, by … diverse hands.” Max pushed his spectacles back up his nose, a gesture I am fond of.
“It’s not boring to me,” I said. Was Max really shy, or did his reticence contain a kind of condescension? Would he have swallowed the fruit of his efforts so swiftly with fellow journalists? Perhaps behind this apparent modesty lay the ghost of my “failures”—not only the unfinished Ph.D., but the unwritten obituaries. He was trying to spare me the exhibition of his success.
“I am capable of following an argument,” I said. Max blinked at me, became uneasy.
“I wasn’t … I wasn’t implying that you weren’t a worthy audience. But the piece itself is ordinary. Two hours flat … is how long it took me.”
Max was in several ways more “philosophical” than I was as a teenager. But at Oxford (then dominated by logicians) he found philosophy unexpectedly difficult. He used to ask me for help, and I largely wrote his big end-of-term essay on Aristotle (which humblingly received a B minus). To the delight of his horrid father he switched to classics. After Oxford, he decided that he wanted to be “in the real world,” and became a reporter for a newspaper in Bristol, followed quickly by a similar job in London, at The Times. One week, he offered to write a column in place of the star columnist, who was on holiday, and the editor liked the piece so much he was given his own space. I still have a copy of that first column. The news of Max’s precocious success—at a time when I was still living at Uncle Karl’s and just starting on the Ph.D.—spread fast, and it was in fact my mother who phoned me to tell me that I should go out and buy The Times. I was excited as if for myself, without any stirring of envy. I remember wondering why I was not at all envious. I concluded that I felt happy because Max was succeeding for both of us. A locket of the purest provincial atavism broke in my hand and released an intoxication; it was Sundershall Max, pitmatic Max, who was appearing in The Times.
And there was his name opposite the venerable letters page. The date was October 13th, 1984. Max was twenty-four. He was much less conservative than he is now, and his article was quite a fierce attack on Mrs. Thatcher, and on the speech she had just delivered at the Conservative Party Conference in Brighton, where the IRA had sent her an inconvenient, hotel-collapsing gift. Mrs. Thatcher was undeterred by the IRA bomb, of course, and pressed on with her speech, which was largely about the Yorkshire and Nottinghamshire miners, who had been on strike for seven months, protesting pit closures. Some of the miners had dared to return to work, and these few, this happy band, were cheered on by the Iron Lady: “They are lions! Men and women like that are what we are proud to call the best of British.”
The subtlety of Max’s article lay not in his attack on Mrs. Thatcher, whom he faulted for the “almost cinematic luridity of her political vision (in the land of the blind, the lady wearing 3-D spectacles will be queen),” but for the way he suggested that such was the natural inertia of British life, the future of the coal industry would be exactly the same whether the miners went on strike or not. This inertia he blamed on an age-old tussle between “anger” and “melancholy.” Max seized on Mrs. Thatcher’s phrase “the best of British,” and asked what “British” really meant. To Stendhal, wrote Max, a Briton was “only fully alive when he was angry.” But as far as de Quincey was concerned, wrote Max, the British were essentially “melancholic.” Both de Quincey and Stendhal were right, Max said. He argued that English history had always oscillated between acts of anger and ideas of melancholy; and that sometimes these opposing tendencies acted against each other at the same time or in the same person. And this is how we British like it, he said. It means that nothing gets done, which is what we want. But along had come Mrs. Thatcher, an “angry” woman, determined to wreck that slothful balance.
Since that first explosive success, Max has written steadily, once a week. I have cut out many of his columns, because for a long time I thought about writing an analysis of what I did and didn’t like about them. He sounds, at times, inauthentic, aping the confidence of older men. And I think he writes too much. The pundit should not become a hack. Max’s fluency, his amazing capacity to write something every week, is a danger. His recent work has seemed especially routine to me. But Max’s readers obviously don’t agree with me, to judge from his burgeoning popularity. And certainly I should not be trusted on this matter. Not only because of what Jane told me last Christmas about him, but because of a general sad feeling I have that Max is no longer playing on my side.
But in the pub, last September, Max was sweetly—or diplomatically—modest.
“Look, Tom, I don’t want to grizzle on about myself,” he said. “And surprisingly enough your dad is much more interesting to me than my latest column. Which you can read tomorrow anyway.”
“Oh, Dad’s fine, of course.”
“Did he seem changed? Is h
e weaker? How is your mum?”
“Yes. No. Fine. To each question respectively.”
“What’s wrong with you? Anyone would think that … it was your heart that had gone into arrest.”
“You’re quite right,” I said. I couldn’t say to Max what I wanted to, that his reverential respect for my parents had always irritated me. I should have been more understanding. His parents, after all, were Colin and Belinda Thurlow. It was no surprise that he had transferred his affections from them to Peter and Sarah Bunting.
“But he did seem changed?”
“Yes. Thinner, older, I suppose. But only to the trained eye. I doubt most people would notice anything significant.”
“Well,” said Max, “I’m pretty … au fait with the way he looks and speaks.”
“Max, you were last in Sundershall about a year ago. Or was it two years? I forget.”
“But every time I go I drop in to see your parents.”
“As I was made to do this time, to your parents.”
“I didn’t know that! Why didn’t you say? How was … the Crassus of the North?” Max sometimes called his father Crassus, after a figure of the same name in Pliny (“not the famous Crassus,” Max told me), who was apparently celebrated in the ancient world for never having laughed.
“Your parents were grilling me about your column.”
“As if they care.” Max pushed his spectacles back up his nose, then ducked into his gravy-coloured beer. His eyes, just above the raised rim of the glass, bore magnifiedly on me.
“Oh, they care all right,” I said. “I think they’re proud of you actually. But too proud to admit their pride. They might even be secretly reading you for all I know.”
“Mum once told me that Dad had confessed to reading me very occasionally in the periodicals room of the university library.”
“So there you are.”
“No, Tom, they can be intermittently proud and still totally opposed to what I do. Apart from the fact that I’m a journalist, nowadays they also don’t like the … progress of my politics. Last time I was there, Dad and I argued about the function of newspapers, while Mum and I argued about Thatcher and the liberation of the Eastern bloc. So I stay away, and I think, actually, that my columns are the better, the bolder, for my knowing that they are entirely unread in Sundershall. Absence … makes the … art grow stronger, I suppose.”