by David Lodge
The cast felt the good vibrations coming from the audience and were in cracking form. There were hardly any re-takes. We wrapped at eight-thirty. Everybody was smiling afterwards. “Hallo, Tubby,” said Ron Deakin, “we missed you at rehearsal today.” I mumbled something about being tied up. Hal gave me a quizzical look, but said nothing. Isabel, the floor manager, told me I’d been well out of it, that the rehearsal had been full of snags and cock-ups. “But that’s always the way,” she said. “If the rehearsal runs like a train, you can be sure the recording will be a disaster.” (Isabel is an unhappy hoper.) Ollie wasn’t there: he’d phoned in to say the roads were too dodgy in his part of the world. Several members of the cast decided to stay overnight in Rummidge in view of the weather, so we all went to the bar. There was a genial, relaxed atmosphere, everybody basking in the sense of a job well done, cracking jokes, buying rounds. I felt a huge affection for them all. It’s like an extended family, and in a way I’m the father of it. Without my scripts, they would never have come together.
Samantha Handy came into the bar, having tucked young Mark up in bed for the night at a nearby hotel, just as I was leaving. She gave me a nice smile, so I smiled back, pleased that she evidently didn’t bear me a grudge from last week’s conversation. “Oh, are you going already?” she said. “Breaking up the party?” “Got to,” I said. “How’s the script-writing going?” “I’m going to discuss my idea with an agent,” she said. “I’ve got an appointment with Jake Endicott next week. He’s your agent, isn’t he? I mentioned that I knew you, I hope you don’t mind.” “No, of course not,” I said, thinking to myself, Cheeky bitch! “Be careful what you wear,” I said. She looked anxious. “Why? Has he got a thing about clothes?” “He’s got a thing about good-looking young women,” I said. “I’d advise a nice, long, baggy bin-liner.” She laughed. Well, she can’t say I didn’t warn her. Jake will go ape when he sees those knockers. She has a pretty face, too, round and freckled, with a hint of a double chin that’s like a trailer for the opulent curves straining at her blouse-front. She took my advice about asking Ollie if she could read some scripts and apparently he’s given her a bundle to report on. A young woman to watch, in more ways than one.
I drove home slowly and deliberately on the icy, deserted roads. Sally was already asleep when I got in. Something about her posture in the bed, flat on her back, and the set of her mouth, told me that she had gone to bed displeased with me – whether for breaking my resolution to stay away from the recording, or for fastforwarding out of the house just as she was serving up supper, or for driving in dangerous conditions, or for all these things, I couldn’t tell. I found out this morning it was something else. Apparently, after I told her I wouldn’t be going to the studio as usual yesterday, she’d invited a couple of neighbours round for a drink in the evening. She swears she told me, so I suppose she must have done, though I haven’t the faintest memory of it. Worrying. She had to phone the Websters again and cancel. Embarrassing, undoubtedly. They’re Tory-voting zombies, but they ask us every year to their Christmas Eve drinks party, and we never ask them back. (On the rare occasions when we give a party I pore over the guest list for hours, agonizing over the choice of names, trying to arrive at a perfectly balanced crowd of scintillating and mutually compatible conversationalists. The Websters are not even considered for such gatherings, though excluding them doesn’t of course prevent me from being in a state of anxiety bordering on hysteria as the party approaches, or from anaesthetizing myself with drink as soon as possible after it starts.) So yesterday evening would have been an opportunity to level up the scores a bit. Sally says now we’ll have to ask them to dinner to make up. I hope that’s just a threat. Anyway, I’m in the doghouse. All the euphoria of last night has evaporated. My knee is playing up this morning, and I’ve definitely pulled a muscle in my back.
Monday afternoon. Just back from physiotherapy. I told Roland about the back muscle, but not that I pulled it fighting with a bantamweight Pakistani ticket-puncher. He assumed it was another tennis injury. In fact I haven’t played this past week, partly because of the weather and partly because I haven’t felt like getting together with my usual partners after what Rupert had told me about Joe and Jean. Roland gave me an old-fashioned back massage as well as Ultrasound on the knee. It’s what physiotherapy was all about when he trained – he’s good at it and he enjoys it. His hands are his eyes, he feels his way into the deepest core of your aches and pains, and gently but firmly eases away the inflammation. Dudley isn’t a patch on him.
Roland’s wife had read him something out of the paper over breakfast this morning, about new extracts from the Diana Squidgey tapes being published in Australia. I said I found it hard to believe these conversations were overheard accidentally. Roland didn’t. It came out that he spends a lot of time at night listening to police messages on the VHF waveband of his Sony portable. “I listen for hours, sometimes,” he said. “In bed, with the earphones on. There was a drug bust in Angleside last night. Quite exciting it was.” So Roland suffers from insomnia too. It must be particularly horrible if you’re blind, lying awake in the night, dark on dark.
One of the depressing things about depression is knowing that there are lots of people in the world with far more reason to feel depressed than you have, and finding that, so far from making you snap out of your depression, it only makes you despise yourself more and thus feel more depressed. The purest form of depression is when you can give absolutely no reason why you’re depressed. As B says, in Either/Or, “A person in sorrow or distress knows why he sorrows or is distressed. If you ask a melancholic what it is that weighs down on him, he will reply, ‘I don’t know what it is, I can’t explain it.’ Therein lies melancholy’s infinitude.”
I’m beginning to get the hang of this peculiar book. The first part consists of the papers of A – jottings, essays like “The Unhappiest Man”, and a journal called The Seducer’s Diary, which is supposed to have been edited by A, but written by someone else called Johannes. A is a young intellectual layabout who suffers from depression, only he calls it melancholy, and makes a cult of it. In the Diary Johannes describes how he seduces a beautiful innocent girl called Cordelia, just to see if he can pull it off against all the odds, and then callously discards her when he succeeds:
now it is over and I want never to see her again … Now all resistance is impossible, and only when it is there is it beautiful to love; once it is gone, love is only weakness and habit.
It’s not clear whether we’re supposed to think The Seducer’s Diary is something A found, or that he made it up, or that it’s really a disguised confession. It’s riveting stuff, anyway, though there’s no sex in it – no bonking, I mean. There’s a lot about sexual feelings. This, for example:
Today my eyes have rested upon her for the first time. It is said that sleep can make an eyelid so heavy that it closes of its own accord; perhaps this glance of mine has a similar effect. Her eyes close, and yet obscure forces stir within her. She does not see that I am looking at her, she feels it, feels it through her whole body. Her eyes close and it is night, but inside her it is broad daylight.
Perhaps that’s how Jake pulls the birds.
The second part of Either/Or consists of some inordinately long letters from B to A, attacking A’s philosophy of life, and urging him to give up melancholy and get his act together. B seems to be a lawyer or a judge, and is happily married. He’s a bit of a prig, actually, but a shrewd one. The bit I quoted just now about melancholy’s infinitude is from his second letter, entitled “The Equilibrium between the Aesthetic and the Ethical in the Development of the Personality,” but the book as a whole is about the opposition of the aesthetic and the ethical. A is the aesthete, B is the ethicist, if that’s a word. (Yes, it is. Just looked it up.) A says: either/or, it doesn’t matter what you choose, you will regret your choice whatever it is. “If you marry, you will regret it, if you do not marry you will regret it; if you marry or do not marry, you will regr
et both,” and so on. That’s why A is so interested in seduction (whether the seduction of Cordelia was real or imagined, A is clearly fascinated by the idea, which means so was old Søren), because to him marriage entails choice (which he would inevitably regret) whereas seduction makes someone else choose and leaves him free. By having Cordelia, Johannes proved to himself that she wasn’t worth having, and is free to discard her and go back to his melancholy. “My melancholy is the most faithful mistress I have known,” he says. “What wonder then that I love her in return?”
B says you must choose. To choose is to be ethical. He defends marriage. He attacks melancholy. “Melancholy is sin, really it is a sin as great as any, for it is the sin of not willing deeply and sincerely, and this is the mother to all sins.” He is kind enough to add: “I gladly admit that melancholy is in a sense not a bad sign, for as a rule only the most gifted natures are afflicted with it.” But B is in no doubt that the ethical life is superior to the aesthetic. “The person who lives ethically has seen himself, knows himself, permeates his whole concretion with his consciousness, does not allow vague thoughts to fuss around in him, nor tempting possibilities to distract him with their legerdemain … He knows himself.” Or herself. Sally is the ethical type, whereas I’m the aesthetic type – except that I believe in marriage, so the cap doesn’t quite fit. And where does Kierkegaard himself stand? Is he A or B, or both, or neither? Is he saying that you must choose between A’s philosophy and B’s, or that whichever you choose you will regret it?
Reading Kierkegaard is like flying through heavy cloud. Every now and again there’s a break and you get a brief, brilliantly lit view of the ground, and then you’re back in the swirling grey mist again, with not a fucking clue where you are.
Monday evening. According to an encylopaedia I’ve just looked up, Kierkegaard came to think that the aesthetic and the ethical are only stages on the way to full enlightenment, which is “religious”. The ethical seems to be superior to the aesthetic, but in the end proves to be founded on nothing more substantial. Then you have to throw yourself on God’s mercy. I don’t much like the sound of that. But in making that “leap”, man “finally chooses himself. A haunting, tantalizing phrase: how can you choose yourself when you already are yourself? It sounds like nonsense, yet I have an inkling of what it might mean.
Sally signalled that she is still pissed off with me by declining to watch The People Next Door tonight, claiming she was too busy. It’s a Monday night ritual, when the show is on the box, that we sit down at nine o’clock and watch it together. It’s a funny thing, but however familiar you are with a TV programme before it’s transmitted, having written the script, attended rehearsals, watched the recording and seen a VHS tape of the final edited version, it’s always different when you watch it being actually transmitted. Knowing that millions of other people are watching it at the same time, and for the first time, changes it somehow. It’s too late to alter it or stop it, and that imparts an edge to the experience. It’s a faint replica of what happens in the theatre when you do your show in front of an audience for the first time. Every Monday evening as the last commercial before the programme freezes and fades on the screen, and the familiar theme tune strikes up over the title sequence, I feel my pulse quickening. And absurdly I find myself willing the cast on as if they were performing live, mentally urging them to get the most out of their lines and sight gags, though rationally I know that everything, every syllable and pause, every nuance of voice and gesture, and the responses of the studio audience, are already fixed and unalterable.
Sally gave up reading my scripts in draft years ago – or perhaps I gave up showing them to her: it was six of one and half a dozen of the other. She never much liked the basic concept of The People Next Door, and didn’t think it would catch on. When it was a runaway success she was pleased of course, for my sake, and for the sake of the lolly that started gushing through the letterbox as if we’d struck oil in the back garden. But, typically, it didn’t shake her faith in her judgement in the least. Then she started to work so hard at her own job that she really had no time or energy to spare for reading scripts, so I stopped bothering her with them. In fact it’s more useful to me to have her watch the programmes not knowing what’s coming next. It gives me an idea of how the other 12,999,999 viewers are reacting, if I multiply her appreciation by a factor of about eight. When Sally gives a chuckle, you can bet they’re falling off their chairs and wetting themselves all over the country. But tonight I had to sit through the show in glum silence, on my own.
Tuesday afternoon, 2nd March. To Alexandra today. She had a cold, and a stuffed-up nose which she kept blowing ineffectually like somebody learning to play the cornet. “Excuse me for mentioning it,” I said, “but you’ll give yourself sinus trouble if you blow your nose like that. I had a yoga teacher once who showed me how to clear my nose, one nostril at a time.” I demonstrated, by pressing a finger against one side of my schnozzle, then against the other. Alexandra smiled weakly and thanked me for the advice. It’s the one thing about yoga that’s really stayed with me. How to blow your nose.
Alexandra asked me how I’d been in the last week. I told her about
the kerfuffle over the future of The People Next Door. She asked me what I was going to do. “I don’t know,” I said. “All I know is that whatever I do, I’ll regret it. If I write Priscilla out of the script, I’ll regret it, if I let someone else do it, I’ll regret it. I’ve been reading Kierkegaard,” I added, thinking Alexandra would be impressed, but she didn’t respond. Perhaps she didn’t hear: she blew her nose just as I said “Kierkegaard.”
“You’re prejudging the issue,” she said. “You’re setting yourself up for failure.”
“I’m just facing facts,” I said. “My indecision is final, as the man said. Take last weekend.” I told her about my vacillation over attending the recording session.
“But you did stick to a decision in the end,” Alexandra observed. “You went to the studio. Do you regret it?”
“Yes, because it put me in the wrong with Sally.”
“You didn’t know at the time that she had invited those neighbours round.”
“No, but I should have listened when she told me. And anyway I knew she would disapprove of my going to the studio for other reasons, like the road conditions – that’s why I rushed out of the house before she had the chance to talk me out of it. If I had given her the chance, I would have finally got the message that the Websters were coming round.”
“And in that case you would have stayed in?”
“Of course.”
“And is that what you wish had happened?”
I thought for a moment. “No,” I said.
We both laughed, rather despairingly.
Am I really in despair? No, nothing as dramatic as that. More like what B calls doubt. He makes a distinction between doubt and despair. Despair is better because at least it entails choice. “So then choose despair, since despair is itself a choice, for one can doubt without choosing to, but despair one cannot without choosing to do so. And when one despairs one chooses again, and what does one choose? One chooses oneself, not in one’s immediacy, not as this contingent individual, one chooses oneself in one’s eternal validity.” Sounds impressive, but is it possible to choose despair and not want to top yourself? Could you just accept despair, live in it, be proud of it, rejoice in it?
B says there’s one thing he agrees with A about: that if you’re a poet you’re bound to be miserable, because “poet-existence as such lies in the obscurity that results from despair’s not being carried through, from the soul’s constantly shivering in despair and the spirit’s being unable to gain its true transparency.” So it seems you can be shivering in despair without actually choosing it. Is this my state? Does it apply to script-writer-existence as well as poet-existence?
Philip Larkin knew all about this sort of despair. I just looked up “Mr Bleaney”:
But if he stood and watched the
frigid wind
Tousling the clouds, lay on the fusty bed
Telling himself that this was home, and grinned.
And shivered, without shaking off the dread
That how we live measures our own nature,
And at his age having no more to show
Than one hired box should make him pretty sure
He warranted no better, I don’t know.
It’s all there: “Shivered … dread … I don’t know.”
What made me think of Larkin was a report in the paper today that Andrew Motion’s forthcoming biography will reveal him in an even worse light than the recent edition of his letters. I haven’t read the Letters and I don’t want to. I don’t want to read the new biography, either. Larkin is my favourite modern poet (about the only one I can understand, actually) and I don’t want to have the pleasure of reading him ruined. Apparently he used to end telephone conversations to Kingsley Amis by saying, “Fuck Oxfam.” Admittedly, there are worse things than saying “Fuck Oxfam”, for instance actually doing it, like the gunmen in Somalia who steal the aid intended for starving women and children, but still, what did he want to say a stupid thing like that for? I took out my charity cheque book and sent off fifty quid to OXFAM. I did it for Philip Larkin. Like Maureen used to collect indulgences and credit them to her dead granddad. She explained it to me one day, all about Purgatory and temporary punishment – daftest stuff you ever heard in your life. Maureen Kavanagh. I Wonder what happened to her. I wonder where she in now.