by Unknown
chemistry of the cocoa bean.
Under the British system, competition begins and ends 14
15
much earlier. Four times, under our educational rules, the human pack is shuffled and cut - at eleven-plus, sixteen-ledge, so that it tended to leak away as fast as he acquired it.
plus, eighteen-plus and twenty-plus - and happy is he who comes top of the deck on each occasion, but especially the Philip Swallow was a man with a genuine love of litera-last. This is called Finals, the very name of which implies ture in all its diverse forms. He was a* happy with Beowulf as that nothing of importance can happen after it. The British with Virginia Woolf, with Waiting/or Godot as with Gammer postgraduate student is a lonely, forlorn soul, uncertain of Gurton's Needle, and in odd moments when nobler examples what he is doing or whom he is trying to please - you may of the written word were not to hand he read attentively the recognize him in the tea-shops around the Bodleian and the backs of cornflakes packets, the small print on railway tickets British Museum by the glazed look in his eyes, the vacant and the advertising matter in books of stamps. This un-stare of the shell-shocked veteran for whom nothing has been discriminating enthusiasm, however, prevented him from real since the Big Push. As long as he manages to land his settling en a 'field' to cultivate as his own. He had done his fint job, this is no great handicap in the short run, since initial research on Jane Austen, but since then had turned tenure is virtually automatic in British universities, and his attention to topics as various as medieval sermons, everyone is paid on the same scale. But at a certain age, the Elizabethan sonnet sequences, Restoration heroic tragedy, age at which promotions and Chairs begin to occupy a eighteenth-century broadsides, the novels of William God-man's thoughts, he may look back with wistful nostalgia to win, the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and premo-the days when his wits ran fresh and clear, directed to a nitions of the Theatre of the Absurd in the plays of George single, positive goal.
Bernard Shaw. None of these projects had bten completed.
Philip Swallow had been made and unmade by the system Seldom, indeed, had he drawn up a preliminary bibliogra-in precisely this way. He liked examinations, always did well phy before his attention was distracted by some new or in them. Finals had been, in many ways, the supreme revived interest in something entirely different. He ran moment of his life. He frequently dreamed that he was taking hither and thither between the shelves of Eng. Lit. like a the examinations again, and these were happy dreams.
child in a toyshop - so reluctant to choose one item to the Awake, he could without difficulty remember the questions exclusion of others that he ended up empty-handed.
he had elected to answer on every paper that hot, distant There was one respect alone in which Philip was recog-June. In the preceding months he had prepared himself nized as a man of distinction, though only within the con-with meticulous care, filling his mind with distilled know-fines of his own Department. He was a superlative examiner ledge, drop by drop, until, on the eve of the first paper of undergraduates: scrupulous, painstaking, stern yet just.
(Old English Set Texts) it was almost brimming over. Each No one could award a delicate mark like B + / B + ?+ with morning for the next ten days he bore this precious vessel to such confident aim, or justify it with such cogency and the examination halls and poured a measured quantity of conviction. In the Department meetings that discussed the contents on to pages of ruled quarto. Day by day the level draft question papers he was much feared by his colleagues fell, until on the tenth day the vessel was empty, the cup was because of his keen eye for the ambiguous rubric, the drained, the cupboard was bare. In the years that followed repetition of questions from previous years' papers, the he set about replenishing his mind, but it was never quite careless oversight that would allow candidates to duplicate the same. The sense of purpose was lacking - there was no material in two answers. His own papers were works of art great Reckoning against which he could hoard his know-on which he laboured with loving care for many hours, tinkering and polishing, weighing every word, deftly 16
17
manipulating eithers and ors, judiciously balancing difficult idle moment for a Fellowship to America and for an questions on popular authors with easy questions on Assistant Lectureship at the University of Rummidge. To obscure ones, inviting candidates to consider, illustrate, his great surprise he was offered both (that First again) and comment on, analyse, respond to, make discriminating Rummidge generously offered to defer his appointment for a assessments of or (last resort) discuss brilliant epigrams of his year so that he would not have to choose between them. He own invention disguised as quotations from anonymous didn't really want to go to America by this time because he critics.
had become sentimentally attached to a postgraduate stu-A colleague had once declared that Philip ought to pub-dent called Hilary Broome who was working on Augustan lish his examination papers. The suggestion had been in-pastoral poetry, but he formed the impression that the Fel-tended as a sneer, but Philip had been rather taken with the lowship was not an opportunity that could be lightly refused.
idea - seeing in it, for a few dizzy hours, a heaven-sent So he went to Harvard and was extremely miserable for solution to his professional barrenness. He visualized a criti-several months. Because he was working on his own, trying cal work of totally revolutionary form, a concise, compre-to finish his thesis, he made few friends; because he had no hensive survey of English literature consisting entirely of car, and couldn't drive anyway, he found it difficult to questions, elegantly printed with acres of white paper be-move around freely. Cowardice, and a dim, undefined tween them, questions that would be miracles of conden-loyalty to Hilary Broome, prevented him from dating the sation, eloquence and thoughtfulness, questions to read and intimidating Radcliffe girls. He formed the habit of taking re-read, questions to brood over, as pregnant and enigmatic long solitary walks through the streets of Cambridge and as haikus, as memorable as proverbs; questions that would, environs, tailed by police cars whose occupants regarded so to speak, contain within themselves the ghostly, subtly gratuitous walking as inherently suspicious. The fillings he suggested embryos of their own answers. Collected Literary had prudently taken care to have put in his teeth before Questions, by Philip Swallow. A book to be compared with leaving the embrace of the National Health Service all fell Pascal's Pensies or Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investiga-out and he was informed by a contemptuous Boston dentist tions ...
that he needed a thousand dollars' worth of dental work But the project had advanced no further than his more immediately. As this sum was nearly a third of his total orthodox ones, and meanwhile Rummidge students had stipend, Philip thought he had found the perfect excuse for begun agitating for the abolition of conventional examina-throwing up his fellowship and returning to England with tions, so that his one special skill was in danger of becoming honour. The Fellowship Fund, however, promptly offered redundant. There had been times, lately, when he had be-to meet the entire cost from its bottomless funds, so instead gun to wonder whether he was entirely suited to the career he wrote to Hilary Broome asking her to marry him. Hilary, on which he had been launched some fifteen years earlier, who was growing bored with Augustan pastoral poetry, not so much by personal choice as by the mere impetus of returned her books to the library, bought a wedding dress off his remarkable First.
the peg at C&A, and flew out to join him on the first available plane. They were married by an Episcopalian minister He had been awarded a postgraduate studentship auto-in Boston just three weeks after Philip had proposed.
matically and had accepted his Professor's suggestion that he write an MA thesis on the juvenilia of Jane Austen. After One of the conditions of the Fellowship was that reci-nearly two years his work was still far from completion and, pients should travel widely in the United States, and Fellows thinking that a change of scene might help, he applied in an were generously provided with a rented car for the purpose.
18
19
By way of a honeymoon, and to escape the severity of the was small. Life was riddled with petty privation. So were New England winter, the young couple decided to start the lives of most people like the Swallows at this time, and their tour immediately. With Hilary at the wheel of a gi-he would not perhaps have repined had he not tasted a gantic brand-new Chevrolet Impala, they headed south to richer existence. Sometimes he came across snapshots of Florida, sometimes pulling off the highway to make fervent himself and Hilary in Euphoria, tanned and confident and love on the amazingly wide back seat. From Florida they gleeful, and, running a hand through his thinning hair, crossed the southern States in very easy stages until they he would gaze at the figures in envious wonder, as if they reached Euphoria and settled for the summer in an attic were rich, distant relatives whom he had never seen in the apartment on the top of a hill in the city of Esseph. From flesh.
their double bed they looked straight across the Bay at the That is why there is a gleam in Philip Swallow's eye as he verdant slopes of Plotinus, location of the Euphoric State sits now in the B O A C Boeing, sipping his orange juice; why, campus.
despite the fact that the plane is shuddering and lurching in This long honeymoon was the key that unlocked the the most terrifying manner due to what the captain has American experience for Philip Swallow. He discovered in just described soothingly over the public address system as himself an unsuspected, long repressed appetite for sensual
'a spot of moderate turbulence', he would not be anywhere pleasure which he assuaged, not only in the double bed with else for the world. Though he has followed the recent history Hilary, but also with simple amenities of the American way of the United States in the newspapers, though he is well of life, such as showers and cold beer and supermarkets and aware, cognitively, that it has become more than ever a heated open-air swimming pools and multi-flavoured ice-violent and melodramatic land, riven by deep divisions of cream. The sun shone. Philip was relaxed, confident, happy.
race and ideology, traumatized by political assassinations, He learned to drive, and flung the majestic Impala up and the campuses in revolt, the cities seizing up, the countryside down the roller-coaster hills of Esseph with native panache, poisoned and devastated - emotionally it is still for him a the radio playing at full volume. He haunted the cellars and kind of Paradise, the place where he was once happy and satirical night-clubs of South Strand, where the Beats, in free and may be so once again. He looks forward with those days, were giving their jazz-and-poetry recitals, and simple, childlike pleasure to the sunshine, ice in his drinks, felt himself thrillingly connected to the Zeitgeist. He even drinks, parties, cheap tobacco and infinite varieties of ice-finished his MA thesis, almost effortlessly. It was the last cream; to being called 'Professor', to being complimented major project he ever finished.
on his accent by anonymous telephonists, to being an object Hilary was four months pregnant when they sailed back of interest simply by virtue of being British; and to exercis-to England in September. It was raining hard the morning ing again his command of American idiom, grown a little they docked at Southampton, and Philip caught a cold rusty over the years from disuse.
which lasted for approximately a year. They rented a damp On Philip's return from his Fellowship, newly acquired and draughty furnished flat in Rummidge for six months, Americanisms had quickly withered on his lips under the and after the baby had arrived they moved to a small, damp uncomprehending or disapproving stares of Rummidge and draughty terraced house, from which, three years later, students and colleagues. A decade later, and a dash of with a second child and another on the way, they moved to a American usage (both learned and vulgar) had become large, damp and draughty Victorian villa. The children acceptable - indeed fashionable - in British academic circles, made it impossible for Hilary to work, and Philip's salary but (it was the story of his life) it was then too late for him to so
91
change his style, the style of a thoroughly conventional cigarettes. Nothing else happens. He is not required to cut English don, keeping English up. American idiom still, up anyone else's chicken, or to guarantee the edibility of however, retained for him a secret, subtle enchantment.
smoked salmon; no neighbouring trays spring suddenly into Was it the legacy of a war-time boyhood - Hollywood films the air or slide resonantly to the floor; his coffee-cup is not and tattered copies of the Saturday Evening Post having estab-dashed from his lips, to deposit its scalding contents in his lished in those crucial years a deep psychic link between crotch; his suit collects no souvenirs of the meal by way of American English and the goodies of which he was de-buttered biscuit crumbs, smears of peach parfait and dribbles prived by rationing? Perhaps, but there was also a purely of mayonnaise. This, he reflects, must be what weight-aesthetic appeal, more difficult to analyse, a subtle music of lessness is like in space, or the lowered gravity of moon-displaced accents, cute contractions, quaint redundancies walks - an unwonted sensation of buoyancy and freedom, a and vivid tropes, which he revives now as the shores of sudden reduction of the effort customarily required by Britain recede and those of America rush to meet him. As a ordinary physical tasks. And it is not just for today, but for virgin spinster who, legatee of some large and unexpected six whole months, that it will last. He hugs the thought to bequest, heads immediately for Paris and points south and, himself with guilty glee. Guilty, because he cannot entirely leaning forward in a compartment of the Golden Arrow, absolve himself of the charge of having deserted Hilary, eagerly practises the French phrases she can remember from perhaps even at this moment presiding grimly over the school-lessons, restaurant menus and distant day-trips to rugged table-manners of the three young Swallows.
Boulogne; so Philip Swallow, strapped (because of the It is a consoling thought, in the circumstances, that the turbulence) into the seat of his Boeing, lips perceptibly desertion was not of his own seeking.
moving but all sound muffled by the hum of the jet Philip Swallow had never actually applied for the engines, tries out on his tongue certain half-forgotten intona-Rummidge-Euphoria exchange scheme, partly out of a well-tions and phrases: 'cigarettes . . . primarily . . . Swiss on Rye founded modesty as to his claims, and partly because he had to go . . . have it checked o u t . . . that's the way the cookie long come to think of himself as too trammelled and shackled crumbles...'
by domestic responsibilities to contemplate such adventures.
No virgin spinster, Philip Swallow, a father of three and As he had said to Gordon Masters, the Head of his Depart-husband of one, but on this occasion he journeys alone. And ment, when the latter asked him whether he'd ever thought a rare treat it is, this absence of dependents - one which, of applying for the Euphoria exchange:
though he is ashamed to admit it, would make him light-
' Not really, Gordon. It wouldn't be fair, you know, to dis-some were his destination Outer Mongolia. Now, for turb the children's education at this stage - Robert's taking example, the stewardess lays before him a meal of am-the eleven-plus next year, and it won't be long before biguous designation (could be lunch, could be dinner, who Amanda's in the thick of" O " Levels.'
knows or cares four miles above the turning globe) but
'Mrnmmmmner your own?' Masters replied. This habit tempting: smoked salmon, chicken and rice, peach parfait, of swallowing the first part of his sentences made communi-all neatly compartmentalized on a plastic tray, cheese and cation with him a stressful proceeding, as did his way of biscuits wrapped in cellophane, disposable cutlery, personal closing one eye when he looked at you as though taking aim salt cellar and pepperpot in dolls'-house scale. He eats along the barrel of a gun. He was in fact a keen sportsman, everything slowly and with appreciation, accepts a second and the walls of his room bore plentiful evidence of his cup of coffee and opens a pack of opulently long duty-free marksmanship in the form of silently snarling stuffed anirryQs.
82
The strangled commencements of his sentences, Philip
'I must admit,' said Philip, freshening the washing-up supposed, derived from his service in the Army, where in water and stirring the suds with gusto, 'that if I did go on many utterances only the final word of command is signi-my own I could probably save quite a lot of money. Enough ficant. From long practice Philip was able to follow his drift to pay for the central heating, I should think.'
pretty well, and therefore answered confidently: The installation of central heating in their cold, damp,
'Oh, no, I couldn't leave Hilary behind to cope on her multi-roomed house had long been an impossible dream of own. Not for six months.'
the Swallows. 'You go, darling,' said Hilary, with a plucky
'Mmmmmmmmnerpose not,' Masters muttered, con-smile. 'You mustn't miss the opportunity. Gordon might not veying a certain disappointment or frustration by the way he be Chairman of this committee again.'
shifted his weight restlessly from one foot to another.
'Jolly decent of him to think of me, I must say.'
'MmminmnTminnunmnimnimnnnnnertunity, though.'
'You always complain that he doesn't appreciate you.'
Straining every mental nerve, Philip gradually pieced
' I know. I feel I've done him rather an injustice.'