The British Museum is Falling Down

by David Lodge

  This is no good, I’m falling asleep. Thank you God for not letting me be pregnant. There, that’s short and sweet and from the heart. Let’s get into bed. Ah. Ooh. My feet are like blocks of ice. I wonder if it will disturb him if I just put my foot just under his knee just there, ah, that’s better. Hallo, he’s stirring, ow, ouch my leg! Have to make him cut his toenails tomorrow, like having another baby to look after, I must stop Clare getting hold of the scissors, if only he would put a hook in high up somewhere, but if you tell him anything he doesn’t listen, comes of having to study in a house full of children. He says if I train myself not to hear the constant racket you can’t expect me to hear you and not the children. Perhaps he’ll improve if we get a bigger flat or better still a house with a garden, somewhere for the children to let off steam, but I doubt it, he’s always in a dream, what was it he said, a novel where life kept taking the shape of literature, did you ever hear anything so cracked, life is life and books are books and if he was a woman he wouldn’t need to be told that.

  Whoooooo there goes another foghorn, they sound so close, such a melancholy sound, reminds me of when he came to see me off at Dover, standing at the quayside with his hands in his pockets trying to shout something, but every time he opened his mouth the hooter went, and of course it had to be a great handsome French boy who was at the rail beside me I never even spoke to him but he couldn’t sleep that night for jealousy he said in his letter funny how jealous he was before we were married well that’s one foot thawed out let’s try the other ah that’s nice he always so warm after we so am I but getting out of bed spoils it perhaps that’s what started it off that’s happened before our honeymoon was the first time three days early instead of late the last one for about two years too what a honeymoon that was but how was I to know it would be early I suppose that’s why they let the girl name the day funny I never thought of that before I didn’t have any choice it was his embarkation leave and I thought it would be a safe period anyway it was safe all right after that the sheets looked like a battle had passed over he nearly had a fit the next morning wanted to smuggle them out pretend we’d lost them settle for a new pair as if hotels weren’t used to he never could stand the sight of blood nearly has kittens if the children cut themselves I suppose I’ll end up putting that hook in myself I seem to lose so much blood since I had Dominic perhaps I could get some pills from the doctor to reduce it but they might upset my cycle that’s another thing against the safe method there are so many things that can affect ovulation there was a great list of them in that book what it was change of environment change of diet illness height above sea level emotional disturbance no wonder they called it Vatican Roulette what is love itself but emotional disturbance perhaps this temperature business is the answer this is the third or is it the fourth month it’s worked the trouble is though once you’ve had a failure with any so called safe method Safe method that’s a laugh Rhythm isn’t much better funny sort of rhythm one week on three weeks off that American girl Jean something was her name Jean Kaufman said once a boy took her to the Rhode Island Rhythm Centre thinking it was a jazz club and taking your temperature every morning that’s a bore Mary said she’s tried everything including temperature charts she’s one of the unlucky ones it won’t work for so what is she supposed to do I’d like to know O the Church will have to change its attitude there’s no doubt about that and if I was in her place I wouldn’t wait there’s many in mine who wouldn’t come to that they say there’s a huge number of Catholics it was in that article he showed me he says the Church is bound to change soon and won’t there be an uproar from the older generation you can see it already in the Catholic papers dear sir I have no patience with the moans of young couples today who put a car and washing machine above the responsibilities of parenthood we have been poor but happy all our lives God always provides mother of nine can’t blame them really for feeling they’ve had a rough deal mum told me when she was young even the safe method was frowned on and you were only supposed to use it if you were starving or going to die from another pregnancy the trouble is this myth of the large family what’s so marvellous about a large family I’d like to know there was only one child in the Holy Family six in ours and we were at each others throats most of the time who’s that Dominic don’t say I’ve got to get out again no he’s stopped only a dream I don’t want any more three would suit me fine ha some hopes how many years to my menopause could be fifteen years my God and that’s when a lot of women have one because they think and I don’t suppose the temperature charts any use then either it’s like lactation that’s how lactation ovulation basal temperature you get to sound like a doctor after a while that’s how Mary had her second funny how many people think you can’t conceive while you’re breast feeding safe method doesn’t work then either so it doesn’t encourage you to breast feed but breast feedings natural so much for the natural law if you ask me nobody gives a damn for the natural law the only reason well perhaps it is the natural law in a way there’s something a bit offputting about contraceptives even non-Catholics would prefer not to I don’t suppose I’d jump for joy if the Pope said it was all right tomorrow don’t like the idea of pushing a bit of rubber and what’s that jelly stuff spermicide Moses the name alone is enough to turn you off and they aren’t 100 per cent reliable anyway surprising the number of non-Catholics who I bet if we decided to use them now that would happen to us wouldn’t that be great perhaps the only way to be perfectly sure would be to combine it with the temperature chart my God you could spend your whole life preparing to get into bed if you let yourself perhaps the pill is the answer but they say it makes you drowsy and other side effects there’s always a snag perhaps that’s the root of the matter there’s something about sex perhaps it’s original sin I don’t know but we’ll never get it neatly tied up you think you’ve got it under control in one place it pops up in another either it’s comic or tragic nobody’s immune you see some couple going off to the Continent in their new sports car and envy them like hell next thing you find out they’re dying to have a baby those who can’t have them want them those who have them don’t want them or not so many of them everyone has problems if you only knew Sally Pond was round the other day who’d have guessed she was frigid because of that man when she was nine can’t do it unless she’s had a couple of stiff drinks got completely stewed the other night she said and bit George in the leg now she’s seeing a psychiatrist it makes you wonder if there’s such a thing as a normal sexual relationship I don’t think there is if you mean by normal no problems embarrassments disappointments there always are not that that entitles the church to sit back and say put up with it can be wonderful too and there are times when married people have to ought to and it isn’t always a safe period either like when Adam was in the army that’s how we had Dominic well perhaps the church will change and a good thing too there’ll be much less misery in the world but it’s silly to think that everything in the garden will be lovely it won’t it never is I think I always knew that before we were married perhaps every woman does how could we put up with menstruation pregnancy and everything otherwise not like men he has this illusion that it’s only the birth control business which stops him from getting sex perfectly under control it’s like his thesis he keeps saying if only I could get my notes in the right order the thesis would write itself what was that he said suddenly when I thought he’d fallen asleep I’ve realised what the longest sentence in English fiction is I wonder what it is he had such an idealistic view of marriage when we were courting I don’t think he’s recovered from the shock yet though I warned him perhaps he didn’t listen to what I said then either even that day at the sea I remember I suppose you could say that was when he proposed though we’d assumed it for some time I wasn’t as starry-eyed as he was though I was pretty carried away I admit that beach with not a soul in sight we bicycled for miles to find it because we’d forgotten our costumes and we went swimming in our underwear his pants were inside out I remember that’s typi
cal we spread our things on the sand to dry the trees came down to the beach we sat in the shade and ate the sandwiches and drank the wine the footprints in the sand were only ours the sea was empty it was like a desert island we lay down he took me in his arms shall we come back here when we’re married he said perhaps I said he held me low down tight against him we’ll make love in this same spot he said my dress was so thin I could feel him hard against me perhaps we’ll have children with us I said then we’ll come down at night he said perhaps we won’t be able to afford to come at all I said you’re not very optimistic he said perhaps it’s better not to be I said I’m going to be famous and earn lots of money he said perhaps you won’t love me then I said I’ll always love you he said I’ll prove it every night he kissed my throat perhaps you think that now I said but I couldn’t keep it up perhaps we will be happy I said of course we will he said we’ll have a nanny to look after the children perhaps we will I said by the way how many children are we going to have as many as you like he said it’ll be wonderful you’ll see perhaps it will I said perhaps it will be wonderful perhaps even though it won’t be like you think perhaps that won’t matter perhaps.

  AFTERWORD

  In late August 1964, at the age of twenty-nine, I embarked at Southampton on the Queen Mary, bound for New York with my wife, Mary, our two children, five suitcases, and the first chapter of what I hoped would be my third published novel. I was beginning a year’s leave of absence from my post as lecturer in English Literature at the University of Birmingham to take up a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship in America. This marvellous foundation allows the lucky recipients of its Fellowships to pursue their own programmes of study wherever they like in the United States, requiring them only to spend at least three months travelling, and providing them with a hired car in which to do so. We settled first at Brown University, in Providence, Rhode Island, where I studied American Literature; and before we set off, in March 1965, in our brand new Chevrolet Bel Air, on the long, leisurely journey westward that would eventually take us to San Francisco, I had finished The British Museum is Falling Down and had it accepted.

  This is easily the shortest period of time in which I have ever succeeded in writing a novel. My freedom from teaching duties was one obvious reason for this, combined with the generally stimulating and liberating effect of the American experience. But another reason for the relative rapidity of composition was my conviction that I had lighted upon a subject of considerable topical interest and concern, especially (but not exclusively) to Roman Catholics; and one that had not been treated substantively by any other novelist, as far as I was aware – certainly not in the comic mode in which I proposed to treat it. That subject was the effect of the Catholic Church’s teaching about birth control on the lives of married Catholics, and the questioning of that teaching which had very recently begun within the Church itself. I wanted to get my novel out while the subject was still a live issue, and before any other writer cottoned on to its possibilities.

  I need not have worried on the first score: Rome did not attempt to settle the matter until 1968, and Pope Paul VI’s encyclical of that year, Humanae Vitae (‘Of Human Life’), endorsing the traditional prohibition of artificial birth control, only succeeded in provoking a much more fundamental debate, which continues to this day, about authority and conscience as well as sexuality. Since I have treated this subject in the course of a more recent novel, How Far Can You Go? (1980), as part of a longer, wider look at changes and developments in Catholicism over the last quarter of a century, I would like to remind readers of this reissue of The British Museum is Falling Down that it was first published in 1965, some three years before Humanae Vitae. The relationship between the two novels, and the differences between them, can hardly be understood without bearing this last fact in mind.

  Adam and Barbara Appleby are not portraits of myself and my wife, and the circumstances of our married life never, I am glad to say, corresponded very closely to theirs. Nevertheless it would be idle to pretend that I would have thought of writing the novel if we had not, in the early years of our married life, found (like most of our married Catholic friends) that the only method of family planning sanctioned by the Church, known as Rhythm or the Safe Method, was in practice neither rhythmical nor safe, and therefore a cause of considerable stress. In How Far Can You Go? a number of the characters, gathered in a pub, ask themselves why they ‘persevered for so many years with that frustrating, inconvenient, ineffective, anxiety-and-tension-creating régime,’ and come up with a variety of answers: it was conditioning, it was the repressive power of the clergy, it was guilt about sex, it was the fear of Hell. Let me put forward another reason here, which was perhaps not given its due in How Far Can You Go? Any intelligent, educated Catholic of that generation who had remained a practising Catholic through adolescence and early adulthood had made a kind of existential contract: in return for the reassurance and stability afforded by the Catholic metaphysical system, one accepted the moral imperatives that went with it, even if they were in practice sometimes inhumanly difficult and demanding. It was precisely the strength of the system that it was total, comprehensive and uncompromising, and it seemed to those brought up in the system that to question one part of it was to question all of it, and that to pick and choose among its moral imperatives, flouting those which were inconveniently difficult, was simply hypocritical. This rage for consistency was probably especially characteristic of British and American Catholicism – Continental European cultures being more tolerant of contradiction between principle and practice; and especially characteristic of the working-class and petit bourgeois Catholic ‘ghetto’. Mr Auberon Waugh, in an exceptionally hostile review of How Far Can You Go?, asserted, of the traditional Catholic teaching on sex, ‘No doubt a few Catholics who took it seriously found it oppressive; but the majority lived in cheerful disobedience.’ Well, that is what it may have looked like from the perspective of Combe Florey House and Downside, but not, I can assure Mr Waugh, from the point of view of the Catholic ‘majority’ in ordinary parishes up and down this country.

  When my wife and I married in 1959, the Catholic prohibition on artificial contraception seemed to us as fixed and immutable a component of Catholic teaching as any article of the Creed. It was conceivable that, not being able to obey it, one might leave the Church; inconceivable that one might in good faith remain a full member of the Church while disobeying, or that the Church itself might change its views. But in the early 1960s those last two possibilities did at last become thinkable, and came to be thought. Two reasons were responsible for this change of climate. First, the invention of the progesterone pill seemed to offer the prospect of a reliable method of contraception which would not be open to the objections of traditional Catholic teaching, and which might therefore be approved without apparent inconsistency. Second, Pope John XXIII, elected in 1958 as a ‘caretaker’ pontiff, had surprised everyone by encouraging Catholics to re-examine many aspects of their faith previously regarded as sacrosanct. In 1962 he called for a second Vatican Council to re-interpret the Catholic faith to the modern world, and in the same year set up a Pontifical Commission to study problems connected with the Family, Population and Birth Control. Pope Paul VI, who succeeded him in the following year, charged this Commission specifically with the task of examining the Church’s teaching on birth control with reference to the Pill. This seemed to admit, at the highest possible level, the possibility of change in the Church’s teaching.

  That was the context in which The British Museum is Falling Down was written; and it explains, among other things, why the book is more purely comic than How Far Can You Go? By the kind of contrivance for which comedy is traditionally licensed, the story has a ‘happy ending’. But this resolution of the characters’ problems is of a very provisional, short-term kind. For both of them, the long-term solution to their sexual frustration is assumed to lie in the prospect of some change in their Church’s teaching. The possibility of making a conscient
ious decision to ignore that teaching is not raised. Like most traditional comedy, The British Museum is Falling Down is essentially conservative in its final import, the conflicts and misunderstandings it deals with being resolved without fundamentally disturbing the system which provoked them. (That more fundamental disturbance is the subject of How Far Can You Go?)