changing-places-david-lodge

by Unknown

  David Lodge

  Changing Places

  A Tale of Two Campuses

  Penguin Books

  i. Flying

  High, high above the North Pole, on the first day of 1969, Although some of the locations and public two professors of English Literature approached each other events portrayed in this novel bear a certain at a combined velocity of 1200 miles per hour. They were resemblance to actual locations and events, the protected from the thin, cold air by the pressurized cabins of characters, considered either as individuals or as two Boeing 707s, and from the risk of collision by the prudent members of institutions, are entirely imaginary.

  arrangement of the international air corridors. Although Rummidge and Euphoria are places on the map they had never met, the two men were known to each other of a comic world which resembles the one we are by name. They were, in fact, in process of exchanging posts standing on without corresponding exactly to it, for the next six months, and in an age of more leisurely and which is peopled by figments of the transportation the intersection of their respective routes imagination.

  might have been marked by some interesting human gesture: had they waved, for example, from the decks of two ocean liners crossing in mid-Atlantic, each man simultaneously focusing a telescope, by chance, on the other, with his free hand; or, more plausibly, a little mime of mutual appraisal might have been played out through the windows of two railway compartments halted side by side at the same station somewhere in Hampshire or the Mid-West, the more self-conscious party relieved to feel himself, at last, moving off, only to discover that it is the other man's train that is moving first. . . However, it was not to be. Since the two men were in airplanes, and one was bored and the other frightened of looking out of the window - since, in any case, the planes were too distant from each other to be mutually visible with the naked eye, the crossing of their paths at the still point of the turning world passed unremarked by anyone other than the narrator of this duplex chronicle.

  'Duplex', as well as having the genera] meaning of'two-fold', applies in the jargon of electrical telegraphy to

  'systems in which messages are sent simultaneously in

  opposite directions' (OED). Imagine, if you will, that each to air travel; while to Morris Zapp, slouched in the seat of his of these two professors of English Literature (both, as it eastbound aircraft, chewing a dead cigar (a hostess has happens, aged forty) is connected to his native land, place of made him extinguish it) and glowering at the meagre employment and domestic hearth by an infinitely elastic portion of ice dissolving in his plastic tumbler of bourbon, umbilical cord of emotions, attitudes and values - a cord the experience of long-distance air travel is tediously which stretches and stretches almost to the point of in-familiar.

  visibility, but never quite to breaking-point, as he hurtles through the air at 600 miles per hour. Imagine further that, Philip Swallow has, in fact, flown before; but so seldom, as they pass each other above the polar ice-cap, the pilots of and at such long intervals, that on each occasion he suffers their respective Boeings, in defiance of regulations and the same trauma, an alternating current of fear and re-technical feasibility, begin to execute a series of playful assurance that charges and relaxes his system in a persistent aerobatics - criss-crossing, diving, soaring and looping, like and exhausting rhythm. While he is on the ground, prea pair of mating bluebirds, so as thoroughly to entangle the paring for his journey, he thinks of flying with exhilaration -

  aforesaid umbilical cords, before proceeding soberly on their soaring up, up and away into the blue empyrean, cradled in way in the approved manner. It follows that when-the two aircraft that seem, from a distance, effortlessly at home in men alight in each other's territory, and go about their that element, as though sculpted from the sky itself. This business and pleasure, whatever vibrations are passed back confidence begins to fade a little when he arrives at the by one to his native habitat will be felt by the other, and airport and winces at the shrill screaming of jet engines. In vice versa, and thus return to the transmitter subtly modified the sky the planes look very small. On the runways they look by the response of the other party - may, indeed, return to very big. Therefore close Up they should look even bigger -

  him along the other party's cord of communication, which but in fact they don't. His own plane, for instance, just is, after all, anchored in the place where he has just arrived; outside the window of the assembly lounge, doesn't look so that before long the whole system is twanging with quite big enough for all the people who are going to get into vibrations travelling backwards and forwards between Prof it. This impression is confirmed when he passes through the A and Prof B, now along this line, now along that, some-tunnel into the cabin of the aircraft, a cramped tube full of times beginning on one line and terminating on another. It writhing limbs. But when he, and the other passengers, are would not be surprising, in other words, if two men changing seated, well-being returns. The seats are so remarkably places for six months should exert a reciprocal influence on comfortable that one feels quite content to stay put, but it is each other's destinies, and actually mirror each other's reassuring that the aisle is free should one wish to walk up it.

  experience in certain respects, notwithstanding all the There is soothing music playing. The lighting is restful. A differences that exist between the two environments, and stewardess offers him the morning paper. His baggage is between the characters of the two men and their respective safely stowed away in the plane somewhere, or if it is not, attitudes towards the whole enterprise.

  that isn't his fault, which is the main thing. Flying is, after One of these differences we can take in at a glance from all, the only way to travel.

  our privileged narrative altitude (higher than that of any But as the plane taxis to the runway, he makes the mistake jet). It is obvious, from his stiff, upright posture, and fulsome of looking out of the window at the wings bouncing gently up gratitude to the stewardess serving him a glass of orange and down. The panels and rivets are almost painfully juice, that Philip Swallow, flying westward, is unaccustomed visible, the painted markings weathered, there are streaks of 8

  soot on the engine cowlings. It is borne in upon him that he hiring retired kamikaze pilots to destroy each other's hard-is, after all, entrusting his life to a machine, the work of ware in the sky, TWA's Boeings ramming Pan Ana's, human hands, fallible and subject to decay. And so it goes American Airlines' D G 8s busting United's right out of their on, even after the plane has climbed safely into the sky: Friendly Skies (hah!), rival shuttle services colliding head-periods of confidence and pleasure punctuated by spasms of on, the clouds raining down wings, fuselages, engines, pas-panic and emptiness.

  sengers, chemical toilets, hostesses, menu cards and plastic The sang-froid of his fellow passengers is a constant source cutlery (Morris Zapp had an apocalyptic imagination on of wonderment to him, and he observes their deportment occasion, as who has not in America these days?) in a carefully. Flying for Philip Swallow is essentially a dramatic definitive act of industrial pollution.

  performance, and he approaches it like a game amateur actor By taking the non-stop polar flight to London, in pre-determined to hold his own in the company of word-perfect ference to the two-stage journey via New York, Zapp professionals. To speak the truth, he approaches most of reckons that he has reduced his chances of being caught in life's challenges in the same spirit. He is a mimetic man: such an Armageddon by fifty per cent. But weighing against unconfident, eager to please, infinitely suggestible.

  this comforting thought is the fact that he is travelling on a charter flight, and chartered aircraft (he has also read) are It would be natural, but incorrect, to assume that M
orris several times more likely to crash than planes on scheduled Zapp has suffered no such qualms on his flight. A seasoned nights, being, he infers, machines long past their prime, veteran of the domestic airways, having flown over most of bought as scrap from the big airlines by cheapjack operators the states in the Union in his time, bound for conferences, and sold again and again to even cheaper jacks (this plane, lecture dates and assignations, it has not escaped his notice for instance, belonged to a company called Orbis; the that airplanes occasionally crash. Being innately mistrustful phoney Latin name inspired no confidence and he wouldn't of the universe and its guiding spirit, which he sometimes mind betting that an ultra-violet photograph would reveal refers to as Improvidence (' How can you attribute that* he a palimpsest of fourteen different airline insignia under its will ask, gesturing at the star-spangled night sky over the fresh paint) flown by pilots long gone over the hill, alcoholics Pacific, 'to something called Providence? Just look at the and schizoids, shaky-fingered victims of emergency landings, wasteV), he seldom enters an aircraft without wondering ice-storms and hijackings by crazy Arabs and homesick with one part of his busy brain whether he is about to Cubans wielding sticks of dynamite and dime-store pistols.

  feature in Air Disaster of the Week on the nation's TV

  Furthermore, this is his first flight over water (yes, Morris networks. Normally such morbid thoughts visit him only at Zapp has never before left the protection of the North the beginning and end of a flight, for he has read somewhere American landmass, a proud record unique among the that eighty per cent of all aircraft accidents occur at either faculty of his university) and he cannot swim. The un-take-off or landing — a statistic that did not surprise him, familiar ritual of instruction, at the commencement of the having been stacked on many occasions for an hour or flight, in the use of inflatable lifejackets, unsettled him. That more over Esseph airport, fifty planes circling in the air, canvas and rubber contraption was a fetishist's dream, but fifty more taking off at ninety-second intervals, the whole he had as much chance of getting into it in an emergency as juggling act controlled by a computer, so that it only needed into the girdle of the hostess giving the demonstration.

  a fuse to blow and the sky would look like airline competi-Furthermore, exploratory gropings failed to locate a life-tion had finally broken out into open war, the companies jacket where it was supposed to be, under his seat. Only his to

  II

  reluctance to strike an undignified pose before a blonde with there has long existed a scheme for the exchange of visiting outsize spectacles in the next seat had dissuaded him from teachers in the second half of each academic year. How two getting down on hands and knees to make a thorough universities so different in character and so widely separated check. He contented himself with allowing his long, gorilla-in space should be linked in this way is simply explained. It like arms to hang loosely over the edge of his seat, fingers happened that the architects of both campuses independent-brushing the underside unobtrusively in the style used for ly hit upon the same idea for the chief feature of their designs, parking gum or nosepickings. Once, at full stretch, he found namely, a replica of the leaning Tower of Pisa, built of something that felt promising, but it proved to be one of his white stone and twice the original size at Euphoric State and neighbour's legs, and was indignantly withdrawn. He of red brick and to scale at Rummidge, but restored to the turned towards her, not to apologize (Morris Zapp never perpendicular in both instances. The exchange scheme was apologized) but to give her the famous Zapp Stare, set up to mark this coincidence.

  guaranteed to stop any human creature, from University Under the original agreement, each visitor drew the Presidents to Black Panthers, dead in his tracks at a range of salary to which he was entitled by rank and seniority on the twenty yards, only to be confronted with an impenetrable scale of the host institution, but as no American could curtain of blonde hair.

  survive for more than a few days on the monthly stipend paid Eventually he abandons the quest for the lifejacket, by Rummidge, Euphoric State made up the difference for reflecting that the sea under his ass at the moment is frozen its own faculty, while paying its British visitors a salary solid anyway, not that that is a reassuring thought. No, this beyond their wildest dreams and bestowing upon them is not the happiest of flights for Morris J. Zapp ('Jehovah', indiscriminately the title of Visiting Professor. It was not he would murmur out of the side of his mouth to girls who only in these terms that the arrangement tended to favour inquired about his middle name, it never failed; all women the British participants. Euphoria, that small but populous longed to be screwed by a god, it was the source of all state on the Western seaboard of America, situated between religion - 'Just look at the myths, Leda and the Swan, Isis Northern and Southern California, with its mountains, lakes and Osiris, Mary and the Holy Ghost* - thus spake Zapp in and rivers, its redwood forests, its blond beaches and its his graduate seminar, pinning a brace of restive nuns to incomparable Bay, across which the State University at their seats with the Stare). There is something funny, he Plotinus faces the glittering, glamorous city of Esseph -

  tells himself, about this plane - not just the implausible Euphoria is considered by many cosmopolitan experts to be Latin name of the airline, the missing lifejacket, the billions one of the most agreeable environments in the world. Not of tons of ice underneath him and the minuscule cube even its City Fathers would claim as much for Rummidge, a melting in the bourbon before him - something else there is, large, graceless industrial city sprawled over the English something he hasn't figured out yet. While Morris Zapp is Midlands at the intersection of three motorways, twenty-six working on this problem, we shall take time out to explain railway lines and half-a-dozen stagnant canals.

  something of the circumstances that have brought him and Then again, Euphoric State had, by a ruthless exploita-Philip Swallow into the polar skies at the same indeterminate tion of its wealth, built itself up into one of America's major (for everybody's watch is wrong by now) hour.

  universities, buying the most distinguished scholars it could find and retaining their loyalty by the lavish provision of Between the State University of Euphoria (colloquially laboratories, libraries, research grants and handsome, long-known as Euphoric State) and the University of Rummidge, legged secretaries. By this year of 1969, Euphoric State had iz

  13

  perhaps reached its peak as a centre of learning, and was The exchange of Philip Swallow and Morris Zapp, how-already in the process of decline - due partly to the ac-ever, constituted a reversal of the usual pattern. Zapp was celerating tempo of disruption by student militants, and distinguished, and Swallow was not. Zapp was the man who partly to the counter-pressures exerted by the right-wing had published articles in PMLA while still in graduate Governor of the State, Ronald Duck, a former movie-actor.

  school; who, enviably offered his first job by Euphoric But such was the quality of the university's senior staff, and State, had stuck out for twice the going salary, and got it; the magnitude of its accumulated resources, that it would be who had published five fiendishly clever books (four of them many years before its standing was seriously undermined.

  on Jane Austen) by the time he was thirty and achieved the Euphoric State, in short, was still a name to conjure with in rank of full professor at the same precocious age. Swallow Jie senior common rooms of the world. Rummidge, on the was a man scarcely known outside his own Department, other hand, had never been an institution of more than who had published nothing except a handful of essays and middling size and reputation, and it had lately suffered the reviews, who had risen slowly up the salary scale of Lecturer mortifying fate of most English universities of its type (civic by standard annual increments and was now halted at the redbrick): having competed strenuously for fifty years with top with slender prospects of promotion. Not that Philip two universities chiefly valued for being old, it was, at the Swallow was lacking in intelligence or ability; but he
lacked moment of drawing level, rudely overtaken in popularity will and ambition, the professional killer instinct which and prestige by a batch of universities chiefly valued for Zapp abundantly possessed.

  being new. Its mood was therefore disgruntled and disIn this respect both men were characteristic of the edu-couraged, rather as would be the mood of the middle class in cational systems they had passed through. In America, it is a iociety that had never had a bourgeois revolution, but had not too difficult to obtain a bachelor's degree. The student passed directly from aristocratic to proletarian control.

  is left very much to his own devices, he accumulates the For these and other reasons the most highly-qualified and necessary credits at his leisure, cheating is easy, and there is senior members of staff competed eagerly for the honour of not much suspense or anxiety about the eventual outcome.

  representing Rummidge at Euphoric State: while Euphoric He (or she) is therefore free to give full attention to the State, if the truth were told, had sometimes encountered normal interests of late adolescence — sport, alcohol, enter-difficulty in persuading any of its faculty to go to Rummidge.

  tainment and the opposite sex. It is at the postgraduate level The members of that 61ite body, the Euphoric State faculty, that the pressure really begins, when the student is bur-who picked up grants and fellowships as other men pick up nished and tempered in a series of gruelling courses and hats, did not aim to teach when they came to Europe, and rigorous assessments until he is deemed worthy to receive the certainly not to teach at Rummidge, which few of them had accolade of the PhD. By now he has invested so much time even heard of. Hence the American visitors to Rummidge and money in the process that any career other than an tended to be young and/or undistinguished, determined academic one has become unthinkable, and anything less Anglophiles who could find no other way of getting to than success in it unbearable. He is well primed, in short, to England or, very rarely, specialists in one of the esoteric enter a profession as steeped in the spirit of free enterprise as disciplines in which Rummidge, through the support of local Wall Street, in which each scholar-teacher makes an in-industry, had established an unchallenged supremacy: dividual contract with his employer, and is free to sell his domestic appliance technology, tyre sciences and the bio-services to the highest bidder.