A Man of Parts

by David Lodge

  ‘Have you spoken to Alice about this?’ he asked.

  ‘Not explicitly, but she knows, I can tell … she doesn’t miss anything.’

  ‘Then it isn’t just in your imagination,’ he said.

  ‘No, I suppose you’re right,’ she said. ‘But it’s so difficult to know what to do when you’re a girl who is … who hasn’t … who isn’t experienced … you understand?’

  ‘Yes,’ he said. ‘I understand.’

  ‘You hear so much talk about sex, and read about it in books, and you don’t know what or who to believe, and anyway, words can never tell you what it’s actually like. Is it wonderful, or just ordinary?’

  ‘It’s both wonderful and ordinary,’ he said.

  They then had a long conversation about sexual love, in which she asked most of the questions and he gave most of the answers, until he put a question himself: ‘Do you mean you would like me to make love to you, Rosamund?’

  ‘Yes, H.G. I want you to.’

  ‘Even though I’m not in love with you? I like you, but I’m not in love with you.’

  ‘I don’t care. I’m in love with you. I have enough love for both of us.’

  She threw herself into his arms at that, and seemed to assume that he would complete her sexual education on the spot, or in some unoccupied outbuilding on the estate, but he calmed her down and counselled caution. As the Blands were soon returning to Dymchurch he said he would think of somewhere near there where they could safely meet, and let her know. ‘But if you should change your mind in the meantime, just—’

  ‘I won’t,’ she said, and silenced him with a kiss.

  IN THE FIRST summer of the new century, when Spade House was being built, he had rented a cottage in the flat fields below the village of Lympne on the northern edge of the Romney Marshes, as a place to which he could retreat, to think and to write, when Arnold House and its environs became too noisy and busy. It was the most basic kind of accommodation for the poorest kind of agricultural worker, just two bare rooms, with an outside earth privy and a well for water, but it served its purpose and cost him only a few shillings a week. He had furnished it with a table and chair, a couch and a few other bits and pieces, bought second-hand so cheaply that he left them there when he gave up the lease. He began The First Men in the Moon in that cottage, and had his narrator Bedford, sole survivor of the lunar expedition, splash down in the sea near Lympne when he returned to earth in his anti-gravity sphere, and recover in the hotel there. Back home in Spade House, following his conversation with Rosamund in the scented darkness of the pergola at Well Hall, he cycled out one day to inspect the cottage and found it unoccupied, with his furniture undisturbed. The farmer who owned the building was willing to let him rent it again on the same reasonable terms.

  It was an ideal place for discreet assignations with Rosamund while the Bland family was in residence at the Other House, in an isolated situation at the end of a rutted cart track, equidistant from Sandgate and Dymchurch. Jane was not surprised when he took the cottage again as a writing retreat – she was used to his sudden flights from domesticity – but when he mentioned casually one day that Rosamund had called on him there she grasped the implication immediately. ‘I hope you know what you’re doing,’ she said. ‘Perfectly,’ he said. He thought of it as completing a young girl’s education at her request. The Blands did not apparently see anything suspicious in Rosamund’s new enthusiasm for taking solo cycle rides in the country – which is to say that Edith didn’t, because Hubert was fortunately detained in London a good deal of the time, and if Alice Hoatson guessed what was going on she kept it to herself. The cottage was not the most comfortable of love nests, but its rustic simplicity conferred a kind of pastoral innocence on their trysts. The couch was somewhat damp, but he dragged it out into the sun and it soon dried. The roof leaked in one place, so he put a bucket under it when it rained, and they washed themselves in the water, which was softer and warmer than from the well.

  The lovemaking was sometimes a little too like a tutorial for it to be fully transporting for him – Rosamund being prone to ask if she was ‘doing it right’ at inappropriate moments – but naked she was a sight to arouse any red-blooded man. Her beauty was already at its full-bloomed, voluptuous perfection, and he felt privileged to enjoy it before it was overblown. She would arrive usually a little while after him, flushed and breathless from the cycle ride, or more likely with excitement and exaltation at the consciousness of being a grown-up woman at last, secretly meeting her lover. He was surprised and amused by how rapidly she progressed from bashful maiden modesty to bold confidence in the ritual of disrobing, soon being quicker than himself to strip off her clothes. Reclining on his couch, its dowdy upholstery covered with an old Liberty throw brought from Spade House, she would turn her dark brown eyes up at him with a coquettish smile that hesitated between that of a licentious mistress and a naughty schoolgirl, her full, widely separated breasts standing out proudly from her torso, reminding him of a copy of Goya’s ‘Naked Maja’ he had seen on the wall of a brothel once. They met perhaps half a dozen times in the cottage that summer, and on the last occasion she forgot to worry about whether she was doing it right and came to a genuine, uncontrollable climax, crying out in surprise and joy. ‘You said it was both ordinary and wonderful,’ she said afterwards, ‘but that was extraordinary and wonderful.’ He felt something like a teacher’s complacency at the end of a successful lesson.

  There was barely room enough on the couch for them to lie together after sex, and certainly not to sleep, so they remained clasped together while Rosamund uttered in a rambling monologue whatever thoughts were passing through her mind. Sometimes these involved further startling confidential revelations about her family, about Hubert in particular. It appeared that he had seduced one of her school friends when the girl was staying with them at Well Hall. ‘How old was she?’ he asked. ‘Oh, seventeen, I think … It wasn’t entirely Daddy’s fault, Georgina rather threw herself at him, but then the silly girl started boasting about it at school and it got back to her parents, who were furious of course, but they decided it was better to hush it up rather than make a public fuss.’ He was astonished by this further evidence of Hubert’s lechery and his uncanny ability to avoid exposure and disgrace. But he was restrained in his comments because Rosamund was unwilling to criticise her father and appeared to regard his philandering as the consequence of a magnetism he was unable to control. ‘You can have no idea, unless you’re a woman yourself. He makes you feel that you are the only person in the world who matters to him. Alice told me she always found him completely irresistible, and Mother did too, I’m sure. She was pregnant with Paul when they married. Alice told me.’ He was uneasily aware that Hubert’s womanising had certain parallels to his own, but the great difference between them was that he did not pretend to believe in marital fidelity, he did not pretend he was in love with all the women he slept with, and he was often the pursued rather than the pursuer, as in the case of Rosamund. And Dorothy Richardson.

  In August Dorothy unexpectedly initiated a renewal of their dormant affair. She invited herself to Sandgate and took the first opportunity to inform him of the latest crisis in her personal psychodrama. She was no longer sharing a flat with the formidable and unsympathetic Miss Moffat and had made a new friend, a young woman called Veronica Leslie-Jones, with whom she felt an immediate and reciprocated affinity, and who had recently moved in to live with her. Although Veronica had a male lover she made it obvious that she was also physically attracted to Dorothy, and Dorothy was disconcerted to find that she herself felt, for the first time in her life, feelings of genuine sexual desire – for Veronica.

  ‘You mean, you never felt genuine sexual desire for me?’ he said.

  ‘Well, yes, up to a point,’ she said reflectively. ‘But it was nothing like this. With you I was always self-conscious, my mind detached from my body, observing its reactions.’

  ‘Yes, I noticed.’

 
‘But with Veronica … the mind–body thing dissolves. It’s an intense feeling of wanting to merge one’s identity with the Other, as if we were twins or something in another incarnation – not that I believe in reincarnation.’

  ‘I should think not,’ he said.

  ‘I feel very confused,’ she said. ‘Does this mean that I’m a lesbian?’

  ‘It could mean you are bi-sexual,’ he said.

  ‘I don’t want to be bi-sexual,’ she said vehemently, ‘I don’t want to be a freak. I don’t want to be a lesbian either, for that matter.’

  ‘What do you actually do with Veronica?’ he said.

  ‘We embrace,’ she said. ‘And talk. That’s all – so far.’

  This conversation took place in his garden-shed-study, which seemed to lend itself to acts of secular confession. ‘What do you want me to do about it?’ he said.

  She pulled a face. ‘You’re so cold. You don’t love me, do you?’

  ‘I never said I did, Dorothy,’ he said. ‘I like you. I find you attractive. I have tried to make you happy. But you’re a difficult subject.’

  ‘Is that why you lost interest in me?’

  ‘I rather thought you’d lost interest in me,’ he said.

  ‘No, I didn’t,’ she said. ‘There’s a way in which ever since I’ve known you, you obliterate other men. You still do.’

  ‘So … what?’

  ‘Make love to me again.’

  It seemed that she wished him to rescue her from lesbianism, and honour required that he should at least try – in any case he had pleasant memories of her compact body, dusted with fine golden hairs, and welcomed the opportunity to reacquaint himself with it. So he fitted her in between assignations with Rosamund, sometimes in the cottage, sometimes at venues in London. Once they walked for a day in the country near Tunbridge Wells, and at his suggestion made love in the bracken somewhere between Eridge and Frant. He always derived a special thrill from making love in the open air – it went back, perhaps, to his adolescent fantasies of Adam and Eve’s nuptial bower – and one of the first indications of his and Jane’s sexual incompatibility had been her flat refusal to indulge him in this respect, not even in a secluded part of their garden at Worcester Park. Dorothy however agreed nonchalantly, stepped out of her drawers, lay down on the coat he spread on the springy bracken, and opened her knees to him, talking all the time about a Russian novel she had been reading. Nothing much changed in this new phase of their relationship apart from the settings of their encounters. Dorothy made more of an effort at physical abandonment in the act of love than in the past, but as soon as it was over she resumed her tireless introspection or lectured him, criticising his materialistic philosophy, correcting the cockney vowels in his speech, and even criticising his prose style.

  ‘Listen to this,’ she said one afternoon when for once they were in her flat, and in her bed, Veronica being away for a few days. She reached across him to the bedside table for an advance copy of In the Days of the Comet, which he had sent her a few days earlier, and sitting up, naked but for her rimless pince-nez spectacles, began to read out a marked passage, one that had given him particular pleasure to write, describing the scullery in Atlas House. ‘It was the region of “washing-up”, that greasy, damp function that followed every meal; its atmosphere had ever a cooling steaminess and the memory of boiled cabbage, and the sooty black stains where saucepan or kettle had been put down for a minute, scraps of potato-peel caught by the strainer of the escape pipe, and rags of a quite indescribable horribleness of acquisition, called “dish-clouts,” rise in my memory at the name. That’s a terrible sentence.’

  ‘What’s wrong with it?’

  ‘It’s far too long and congested, for one thing – you should have started a new sentence after “meal”, instead of putting a semicolon there. And there’s intrusive assonance – “indescribable horribleness”, for instance. But the real problem is the repetition of “memory”. When it first occurs we presume that it’s the subject of the long complex main clause that follows, but when we eventually come to the predicate it’s “rise in my memory ” and we are confused. How can a memory rise in a memory? So we go back to the first “memory ” and discover that it isn’t a subject after all, but an object, the metaphorical object of “had”: “its atmosphere had ever … the memory of boiled cabbage”.’

  ‘“The memory of boiled cabbage ” is a good phrase,’ he protested.

  ‘It’s good in itself,’ she said, addressing him over her pince-nez like a severe schoolmistress. ‘But because it’s separated from the verb by another, non-metaphorical object, “a cooling steaminess”, we don’t connect it back to “had ” on first reading, but presume it is the subject of a new clause. The grammatical ambiguity spoils the effect.’

  He took the book from her hands and read the passage for himself. He had to concede that she was right, and thought to himself that he might in future ask her to read his galley proofs and suggest emendations. Jane, who was also a better grammarian than himself, was too deferential to make many editorial suggestions when she typed his work. He composed rapidly, the words flying off the end of his pen, and lacked the necessary patience to tune and polish his style like, say, Henry James – though for different reasons you had often to read his labyrinthine sentences more than once to make sense of them.

  James had visited Spade House at last, staying for a weekend in August. ‘Delightful to me is the sense of the end of my grotesque Years of Delay to tread your charming halls,’ he wrote, when confirming the time of his arrival. He had sent a previous request to inform ‘Mrs Wells, with my best remembrance, that my dietary is the easiest mere tissue of feeble negatives. I eat but little here below, but I eat that little long.’ This was a reference to his ‘Fletcherising’ – the practice of chewing solid food at inordinate length before swallowing it, recommended by an American quack called Fletcher. Gip and Frank, when they had the opportunity, watched this performance with fascination. Gip called James ‘the Egg Man’ because he had three coddled eggs for breakfast, and perhaps because he looked somewhat egg-shaped these days, with his symmetrically curved paunch, clean-shaven oval face, and big balding brow. He was however an amiable and gracious guest, praising the appointments of the house with a gallant effort at sincerity. ‘My dear fellow, you have borrowed – or anticipated – the best features of my native country’s domestic interior design, while avoiding its vulgarity,’ he pronounced after a tour of the property. Even the lavatories attached to every bedroom attracted a commendation that was only slightly tongue-in-cheek – ‘a veritable sanitary utopia!’

  Each of them had recently undertaken a tour of the United States, and both were shortly to publish books based on these experiences. ‘Yours will of course sell much better than mine,’ James said with a sigh, and he could not plausibly contest this prediction. The disappointing sales of James’s books, especially the three major novels he had published in recent years – The Wings of the Dove, The Ambassadors and The Golden Bowl – were a constant cause of complaint in correspondence, and also of a certain embarrassment in their relationship. Writing to praise The Ambassadors, he had tactlessly mentioned the sales of a book of his own short stories, and James had responded dolefully, almost accusingly, ‘My book has been out upwards of a month and, not emulating your 4,000, has sold, I believe, to the extent of 4 copies.’ He sympathised and did his bit to promote the appreciation of James’s work – warmly recommending The Wings of the Dove to Arnold Bennett, for instance, and choosing The Golden Bowl as one of his Books of the Year for the Bookman – but there was never any hope that James would be a popular writer.

  James had written in generous and gratifying praise of Kipps a year ago, comparing him favourably with Dickens, Thackeray and George Eliot, though as usual there was a hint of reservation beneath the extravagant encomiums. ‘What am I to say about Kipps but that I am ready, that I am compelled, utterly to drivel about him? He is not so much a masterpiece as a mere born gem �
� you having, I know not how, taken a header straight down into mysterious depths of observation & knowledge, I know not which & where, & come up again with this rounded pearl of the diver.’ The more one thought about this metaphor, the less credit it gave the novelist for artistry, and the more it seemed to attribute his achievement to luck. He was grateful, nevertheless, for the words of praise, and a little surprised that James did not take him to task for the scamped concluding chapters. When he mentioned this in conversation his guest looked a little shifty, and he suspected that James had not in fact read to the end of the novel. Never mind – he himself had never finished The Golden Bowl. They were both prolific writers and obviously hadn’t enough time to read every word the other had written.

  James indeed was concerned that his friend was squandering too much of his time on politics. His detailed account of his struggles with the Fabian Old Gang was heard with polite interest at first, soon shading into boredom and disapproval. ‘These committees and cabals, these motions and amendments, these debates and dryasdust reports, they are death to the creative impulse, my dear Wells,’ James declared. ‘The job of the artist is to enlighten and enrich the collective consciousness by the exercise of his imagination in his chosen medium. That is his proper contribution to politics.’

  ‘Art for art’s sake?’ he questioned.

  ‘Art for Life’s sake!’ James said, with the air of a man laying down a trump card.

  ‘I want to change the world,’ he said, ‘not just describe it. One has to start somewhere, and I decided to begin by changing the Fabian.’