Campus Trilogy : Changing Places; Small World; Nice Work (9781101577127)

by Lodge, David

  A chance reunion with Charles Boon would not, in normal circumstances, have gladdened Philip Swallow’s heart. The young man had graduated a couple of years previously after a contentious and troublesome undergraduate career at Rummidge. He belonged to a category of students whom Philip referred to privately (showing his age) as “the Department’s Teddy-Boys.” These were clever young men of plebeian origin who, unlike the traditional scholarship boy (such as Philip himself), showed no deference to the social and cultural values of the institution to which they had been admitted, but maintained until the day they graduated a style of ostentatious uncouthness in dress, behaviour and speech. They came late to classes, unwashed, unshaven and wearing clothes they had evidently slept in; slouched in their seats, rolling their own cigarettes and stubbing them out on the furniture; sneered at the girlish, suburban enthusiasms of their fellow-students, answered questions addressed to them in dialect monosyllables, and handed in disconcertingly subtle, largely destructive essays written in the style of F. R. Leavis. Perhaps overcompensating for their own prejudices, the staff at Rummidge regularly admitted three or four such students every year. Invariably they caused disciplinary problems. In his memorable undergraduate career Charles Boon had involved the student newspaper Rumble, of which he was editor, in an expensive libel suit brought by the mayoress of Rummidge; caused the Lodgings warden to retire prematurely with a nervous disorder from which she still suffered; appeared on “University Challenge,” drunk; campaigned (unsuccessfully) for the distribution of free contraceptives at the end of the Freshers’ Ball, and defended himself (successfully) in a magistrate’s court against a charge of shop-lifting from the University Bookshop.

  As Boon’s tutor in his third year, Philip had played a minor, but exhausting role in some of these dramas. After an examiners’ meeting lasting ten hours, nine of which were spent in discussion of Boon’s papers, he had been awarded a “low Upper Second”—a compromise grudgingly accepted by those who wanted to fail him and those who wanted to give him a First. Philip had shaken Boon’s hand on Degree Day in joyful expectation of never having anything to do with him again, but the hope was premature. Though Boon had failed to qualify for a postgraduate grant, he continued to haunt the corridors of the Faculty of Arts for some months, giving other students to understand that he was employed as a Research Assistant, hoping in this way to embarrass the Department into actually making him one. When this gambit failed, Boon at last disappeared from Rummidge, but Philip, at least, was not allowed to forget his existence. Seldom did a week pass without a request for a confidential assessment of Mr. Charles Boon’s character, intelligence and suitability for some position in the great world. At first these were usually teaching posts or postgraduate fellowships at home and abroad. Later, Boon’s applications took on a random, reckless character, as of a man throwing dice compulsively, without bothering to note his score. Sometimes he aimed absurdly high, sometimes grotesquely low. At one moment he aspired to be Cultural Attaché in the Diplomatic Service, or Chief Programme Planning Executive for Ghana Television, at the next he was prepared to settle for Works Foreman, Walsall Screw Company, or Lavatory Attendant, Southport Corporation. If Boon was appointed to any of these posts he evidently failed to hold them for very long, for the stream of inquiries never ran dry. At first Philip had answered them honestly; after a while it dawned on him that he was in this way condemning himself to a lifetime’s correspondence, and he began to suppress some of the less creditable features of his former student’s character and record. He ended up answering every request for a reference with an unblushing all-purpose panegyric kept on permanent file in the Department Office, and this testimonial must have finally obtained Boon some kind of graduate fellowship at Euphoric State. Now Philip’s perjury had caught up with him, as such sins always did. It was deuced awkward that they should both be going to Euphoric State at the same time—he fervently hoped that he would not be identified as Boon’s original sponsor. And at all costs Boon must be prevented from enrolling in his own courses.

  Despite these misgivings, Philip is not altogether displeased at finding himself on the same plane as Charles Boon. He awaits the latter’s return, indeed, with something like eagerness. It is, he explains to himself, because he is bored with the journey, glad of company for the last, long hours of this interminable flight; but, truthfully, it is because he wants to show off. The glory of his adventure needs, after all, a reflector, someone capable of registering the transformation of the dim Rummidge lecturer into Visiting Professor Philip Swallow, member of the academic jet-set, ready to carry English culture to the far side of the globe at the drop of an airline ticket. And for once he will have the advantage of Boon, in his previous experience of America. Boon will be eager for advice and information: about looking left first when crossing the road, for example; about “public school” meaning the opposite of what it means in England, and “knock up” meaning something entirely different. He will also frighten Boon a little with the rigours of American graduate programmes. Yes, he has lots to say to Charles Boon.

  “Now,” says Boon, easing himself into the seat beside Philip’s, “let me put you in the picture about the situation in Euphoria.”

  Philip gapes at him. “You mean you’ve been there already?”

  Boon looks surprised. “Sure, this is my second year. I’ve just been home for Christmas.”

  “Oh,” says Philip.

  …

  “I guess you must’ve visited England many times, Professor Zapp,” says the blonde, whose name is Mary Makepeace.

  “Never.”

  “Really? You must be all excited then. All those years of teaching English Literature, and now you finally get to see where it all happened.”

  “That’s what I’m afraid of,” says Morris Zapp.

  “If I get the time I’m going to visit my great-grandmother’s grave. It’s in a village churchyard in County Durham. Don’t you think that sounds idyllic?”

  “You going to have the foetus buried there?”

  Mary Makepeace turns her head away and looks out of the window. The word “Sorry” rises to Morris’s lips, but he bites it back. “You don’t want to face facts, do you? You want to pretend it’s just like going to the dentist. Having a tooth extracted.”

  “I’ve never had a tooth extracted,” she says, and he believes her. She continues to gaze out of the window, though there is nothing to see except cloud, stretching to the horizon like an endless roll of roof insulation.

  “I’m sorry,” he says, surprising himself.

  Mary Makepeace turns her head back in his direction. “What’s eating you, Professor Zapp? Don’t you want to go to England?”

  “You guessed it.”

  “Why not? Where are you going?”

  “A dump called Rummidge. You don’t have to pretend you’ve heard of it.”

  “Why are you going there?”

  “It’s a long story.”

  It was indeed, and the question put by Mary Makepeace had exercised many a group of gossiping faculty when it was announced that Morris Zapp was the year’s nominee for the Rummidge-Euphoria exchange scheme. Why should Morris Zapp, who always claimed that he had made himself an authority on the literature of England not in spite of but because of never having set foot in the country, why should he of all people suddenly join the annual migration to Europe? And, still more pressingly, why did a man who could have gotten a Guggenheim by crooking his little finger, and spent a pleasant year reading in Oxford, or London, or on the Côte d’Azur if he chose, condemn himself to six months’ hard labour at Rummidge? Rummidge. Where was it? What was it? Those who knew shuddered and grimaced. Those who did not went home to consult encyclopedias and atlases, returning baffled to confer with their colleagues. If it was a plot by Morris to further his career, no one could give a satisfactory account of how it would work. The most favoured explanation was that he was finally getting tired of the Student Revolution, its strikes, protests, issues, nonnego
tiable demands, and was willing to go anywhere, even to Rummidge, for the sake of a bit of peace and quiet. Nobody dared actually to test this hypothesis on the man himself, since his resistance to student intimidation was as legendary as his sarcasm. Then at last the word got round that Morris was going to England on his own, and all was clear: the Zapps were breaking up. The gossip dwindled away; it was nothing unusual after all. Just another divorce.

  Actually, it was more complicated than that. Désirée, Morris’s second wife, wanted a divorce, but Morris didn’t. It was not Désirée that he was loth to part from, but their children, Elizabeth and Darcy, the darlings of Morris Zapp’s otherwise unsentimental heart. Désirée was sure to get custody of both children—no judge, however fairminded, was going to split up a pair of twins—and he would be restricted to taking them out to the park or a movie once a month. He had been all through that routine once before with his daughter by his first wife, and in consequence she had grown up with about as much respect for him as for the insurance salesman whom he must have resembled to her childish vision, turning up on her stoop at regular intervals with a shy, ingratiating smile, his pockets bulging with candy dividends; and this time it would cost him $300.00 per visit in fares since Désirée proposed moving to New York. Morris had been born and brought up in New York, but he had no intention of returning there, in fact he would not repine if he never saw the city again: on the evidence of his last visit it was only a matter of time before the garbage in the streets reached penthouse level and the whole population suffocated.

  No, he didn’t want to go through all that divorce hassle again. He pleaded with Désirée to give their marriage another chance, for the children’s sake. She was unmoved. He was a bad influence on the children anyway, and as for herself she could never be a fulfilled person as long as she was married to him.

  “What have I done?” he demanded rhetorically, throwing his arms about.

  “You eat me.”

  “I thought you liked it!”

  “I don’t mean that, trust your dirty mind, I mean psychologically. Being married to you is like being slowly swallowed by a python. I’m just a half-digested bulge in your ego. I want out. I want to be free. I want to be a person again.”

  “Look,” he said, “let’s cut out all this encounter-group crap. It’s that student you found me with last summer, isn’t it?”

  “No, but she’ll do to get the divorce. Leaving me at the Dean’s reception to go home and screw the baby-sitter, that should make an impression on the judge.”

  “I told you, she’s gone back East, I don’t even know her address.”

  “I’m not interested. Can’t you get it into your head that I don’t care where you keep your big, fat circumcised prick? You could be banging the entire women’s field hockey team every night for all I care. We’re past all that.”

  “Look, let’s talk about this like two rational people,” he said, making a gesture of serious concern by turning off the TV football game he had been watching with one eye throughout this argument.

  After an hour’s exhausting discussion, Désirée agreed to a compromise: she would delay starting divorce proceedings for six months on condition he moved out of the house.

  “Where to?” he grumbled.

  “You can find a room somewhere. Or shack up with one of your students, I’m sure you’ll have plenty of offers.”

  Morris Zapp frowned, foreseeing what an ignominious figure he would cut in and around the University, a man turned out of his own home, washing his shirts in the campus launderette and eating lonely dinners at the Faculty Club.

  “I’ll go away,” he said. “I’ll take six months’ leave at the end of the quarter. Give me till Christmas.”

  “Where will you go?”

  “Somewhere.” Inspiration came to him, and he added, “Europe maybe.”

  “Europe? You?”

  Slyly he watched her out of the corner of his eye. For years Désirée had been pestering him to take her to Europe, and always he had refused. For Morris Zapp was that rarity among American Humanities Professors, a totally unalienated man. He liked America, Euphoria particularly. His needs were simple: a temperate climate, a good library, plenty of inviting ass around the place and enough money to keep him in cigars and liquor and to run a comfortable modern house and two cars. The first three items were, so to speak, natural resources of Euphoria, and the fourth, the money, he had obtained after some years of strenuous effort. He did not see how he could improve his lot by travelling, certainly not by trailing around Europe with Désirée and the kids. “Travel narrows,” was one of the Zapp proverbs. Still, if it came to the crunch, he was prepared to sacrifice this principle in the interests of domestic harmony.

  “Why don’t we all go?” he said.

  He watched the emotions working across her face, lust for Europe contending with disgust for himself. Disgust won by a knockout.

  “Go fuck yourself,” she said, and walked out of the room.

  Morris fixed himself a stiff drink, put an Aretha Franklin LP on the hi-fi and sat down to think. He was in a spot. He had to go to Europe now, to save face. But it was going to be difficult to fix things at such short notice. He couldn’t afford to go at his own expense: though his salary was considerable, so was the cost of running the house and supporting Désirée in the style to which she was accustomed, not to mention alimony payments to Martha. He couldn’t apply for paid study-leave because he had just had two quarters off. It was too late to apply for a Guggie or a Fulbright and he had an idea that European universities didn’t hire visitors as casually as they did in the States.

  The next morning he called the Dean of Faculty.

  “Bill? Look, I want to go to Europe for six months, as soon after Christmas as possible. I need some kind of a deal. What have you got?”

  “Where in Europe, Morris?”

  “Anywhere, Bill.”

  “England?”

  “Even England.”

  “Gee, Morris, I wish you’d asked me earlier. There was a swell opening in Paris, with UNESCO, I fixed up Ed Waring in Sociology just a week ago.”

  “Spare me the narrow misses, Bill, what have you got?”

  There was a rustling of papers. “Well, there is the Rummidge exchange, but you wouldn’t be interested in that, Morris.”

  “Just give me the dope.”

  Bill gave it to him, concluding, “You see, it isn’t your class, Morris.”

  “I’ll take it.”

  Bill tried to argue him out of it for a while, then confessed that the Rummidge post had already been given to a young assistant professor in Metallurgy.

  “Tell him he can’t have it after all. Tell him you made a mistake.”

  “I can’t do that, Morris. Be reasonable.”

  “Give him accelerated promotion to Associate Professor. He won’t argue.”

  “Well …” Bill Moser hesitated, then sighed. “I’ll see what I can do, Morris.”

  “Great, Bill, I won’t forget it.”

  Bill’s voice dropped to a lower, more confidential pitch. “Why the sudden yearning for Europe, Morris? Students getting you down?”

  “You must be joking, Bill. No, I think I need a change. A new perspective. The challenge of a different culture.”

  Bill Moser roared with laughter.

  Morris Zapp wasn’t surprised that Bill Moser was incredulous. But there was a kind of truth in his answer that he wouldn’t have dreamed of admitting except in the guise of a palpable lie.

  For years Morris Zapp had, like a man exceptionally blessed with good health, taken his self-confidence for granted, and regarded the recurrent identity crises of his colleagues as symptoms of psychic hypochondria. But recently he had caught himself brooding about the meaning of his life, no less. This was partly the consequence of his own success. He was full professor at one of the most prestigious and desirably located universities in America, and had already served as the Chairman of his Department for three years under
Euphoric State’s rotating system; he was a highly respected scholar with a long and impressive list of publications to his name. He could only significantly increase his salary either by moving to some god-awful place in Texas or the Mid-West where no one in his right mind would go for a thousand dollars a day, or by switching to administration, looking for a college President’s job somewhere, which in the present state of the nation’s campuses was a through ticket to an early grave. At the age of forty, in short, Morris Zapp could think of nothing he wanted to achieve that he hadn’t achieved already, and this depressed him.

  There was always his research, of course, but some of the zest had gone out of that since it ceased to be a means to an end. He couldn’t enhance his reputation, he could only damage it, by adding further items to his bibliography, and the realization slowed him down, made him cautious. Some years ago he had embarked with great enthusiasm on an ambitious critical project: a series of commentaries on Jane Austen which would work through the whole canon, one novel at a time, saying absolutely everything that could possibly be said about them. The idea was to be utterly exhaustive, to examine the novels from every conceivable angle, historical, biographical, rhetorical, mythical, Freudian, Jungian, existentialist, Marxist, structuralist, Christian-allegorical, ethical, exponential, linguistic, phenomenological, archetypal, you name it; so that when each commentary was written there would be simply nothing further to say about the novel in question. The object of the exercise, as he had often to explain with as much patience as he could muster, was not to enhance others’ enjoyment and understanding of Jane Austen, still less to honour the novelist herself, but to put a definitive stop to the production of any further garbage on the subject. The commentaries would not be designed for the general reader but for the specialist, who, looking up Zapp, would find that the book, article or thesis he had been planning had already been anticipated and, more likely than not, invalidated. After Zapp, the rest would be silence. The thought gave him deep satisfaction. In Faustian moments he dreamed of going on, after fixing Jane Austen, to do the same job on the other major English novelists, then the poets and dramatists, perhaps using computers and teams of trained graduate students, inexorably reducing the area of English literature available for free comment, spreading dismay through the whole industry, rendering scores of his colleagues redundant: periodicals would fall silent, famous English Departments be left deserted like ghost towns …