by Lodge, David
“That you’re already engaged?” Persse suggests.
“Ah, but I’m not,” says the girl sadly. Her name is Song-Mi Lee, and she seems, to judge from the names she casually lets drop, to move in high academic circles in the United States. She tells him that the conference on Critical Theory and Comparative Literature will almost certainly be held at the Korean Academy of Sciences, a purpose-built conference and study centre just outside Seoul. He can take a taxi from the city centre, but must be sure to agree the fare first and should refuse to pay more than 700 won. Later, after they have landed, he sees her in the Arrivals hall of the airport, demurely smiling and amazingly sober, being greeted with bouquets by proud parents in tailored Western clothes.
It is the monsoon season in Korea, and Seoul is wet and humid, a concrete wilderness of indistinguishable suburbs ringing a city centre whose inhabitants are apparently so terrorized by the traffic that they have decided to live under the ground in a complex of subways lined with brightly lit shops. Persse takes a taxi to the Korean Academy of Sciences, a complex of buildings in oriental-modernist style set at the feet of low wooded hills, but the conference on Critical Theory and Comparative Literature has, he is hardly surprised to learn, finished and its participants have dispersed—some on a sightseeing tour of the south. So Persse takes a train which trundles through a sopping and unrelievedly green landscape of paddy fields and tree-topped hills swathed in mist, to the resort town of Kyong-ju, site of many ancient monuments, temples and modern hotels, and an artificial lake on which floats, like a gigantic bathtoy, a fibreglass pleasureboat in the shape of a white duck, disembarking from which Persse meets, not Angelica, but Professor Michel Tardieu, in the company of three smiling Korean Professors, all called Kim. Angelica, he learns from Tardieu, was indeed at the conference, but did not join the sightseeing tour. Tardieu seems to remember that she was going on to another conference, in Hong Kong.
…
Now it is mid-August, and Morris Zapp’s conference on the Future of Criticism in Jerusalem is in full swing. Almost everybody involved agrees that it is the best conference they have ever attended. Morris is smug. The secret of his success is very simple: the formal proceedings of the conference are kept to a bare minimum. There is just one paper a day actually delivered by its author, early in the morning. All the other papers are circulated in Xeroxed form, and the remainder of the day is allocated to “unstructured discussion” of the issues raised in these documents, or, in other words, to swimming and sunbathing at the Hilton pool, sightseeing in the Old City, shopping in the bazaar, eating out in ethnic restaurants, and making expeditions to Jericho, the Jordan valley, and Galilee.
The Israeli scholars, a highly professional and fiercely competitive group, are disgruntled with this arrangement, since they have been looking forward to attacking each other in the presence of a distinguished international audience, and the tourist attractions of Jerusalem and environs naturally have less novelty for them. But everybody else is delighted, with the exception of Rodney Wainwright, who still has not finished his paper. The only finished paper he has in his luggage is one by Sandra Dix, submitted to him just before he left Australia as part of her assessment in English 351. It is entitled “Matthew Arnold’s Theory of Culture,” and it begins:
According to Matthew Arnold culture was getting to know, on the matters that most concerned you, the best people. Matthew Arnold was a famous headmaster who wrote “Tom Brown’s Schooldays” and invented the game of Rugby as well as the Theory of Culture. If I don’t get a good grade for this course I will tell your wife that we had sex in your office three times this semester, and you wouldn’t let me out when there was a fire drill in case somebody saw us leaving the room together…
Rodney Wainwright goes hot and cold every time he thinks of this term-paper, to which he awarded a straight “A” without a moment’s hesitation, and which he has brought with him to Israel in case Bev or some colleague should happen to go through his desk drawers while he is away and find it. But he goes even hotter and colder when he thinks of his own conference paper, still stalled at, “The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism…” If only he had completed it in time! Then it could have been photocopied and circulated like most of the other contributions to the conference, and it wouldn’t have mattered if it had been unconvincing, or even unintelligible, because nobody is seriously reading the papers anyway—you keep coming across them in the Hilton waste baskets… But because he hadn’t a finished text to give Morris Zapp when he arrived, Rodney Wainwright has been allocated one of the “live,” formal sessions—yes, he has been accorded the privilege of delivering his paper in person, on, in fact, the penultimate morning of the conference, for he was obliged to ask for as much grace as possible.
It’s not surprising, therefore, that Rodney Wainwright is unable to throw himself enthusiastically into the giddy round of pleasure that his fellow-conferees are enjoying. While they are at the poolside, or at the bar, or within the walls of the Old City, or in the air-conditioned bus, he is sitting at his desk behind drawn blinds in his room at the Hilton, sweating and groaning over his paper—or if he is not, he is guiltily aware that he ought to be. His colleagues’ carefree high spirits add gall to his own misery, and as the week passes with no progress on his paper, and professional humiliation looming ever nearer, his resentment of their euphoric mood focuses upon one man in particular: Philip Swallow. Philip Swallow, with his theatrical silver beard and his braying Pommie voice and his unaccountably dishy mistress. What does she see in him? It must be the randy old goat’s appetite for sex, because they seem to have a lot of that: Rodney Wainwright happens to occupy the room next to theirs and is not infrequently disturbed, working on his paper in the watches of the night, or in the middle of the afternoon, by muffled cries of pleasure audible when he presses his ear to the party wall; and if he should go out onto his balcony in the cool of the evening to stretch his cramped limbs, the chances are that Philip Swallow and his Joy will be on the adjacent balcony, clasped tenderly together, Joy rhapsodizing about the sunset reflected on the roofs and domes of the Old City, while Philip fondles her tits under her négligé. Rodney surprised Joy sunbathing topless on her balcony one morning when she evidently expected him to be at the formal paper session, and he has to admit that the tits would be well worth fondling. Not quite as spectacular as Sandra Dix’s, perhaps, but then Sandra Dix seemed to derive little pleasure from having them fondled by Rodney Wainwright, or indeed, from any aspect of his sexual performance, insisting on chewing gum throughout intercourse, and breaking silence only to ask if he wasn’t finished yet. For such meagre erotic reward has he risked domestic catastrophe in Cooktown, which makes it all the more aggravating to face professional disgrace in Jerusalem to the accompaniment of loudly voiced orgasmic bliss from the next room.
How does Philip Swallow do it? After screwing his blonde bird into the small hours, he is up bright and early for a swim in the hotel pool, never misses the morning lecture, is always first on his feet with a question when the speaker sits down, and signs up unfailingly for every sightseeing excursion on offer. It is as if the man has been given ten days to live and is determined to pack every instant with sensation, sublime or gross. No sooner have they all returned from retracing the Way of the Cross or inspecting the Dome of the Rock or visiting the Wailing Wall, than Philip Swallow is organizing a party to eat stuffed quail at an Arab restaurant hidden away in some crooked alley of the Old City which has been particularly recommended to him by one of the Israelis, setting off afterwards in a taxi with Joy and other dedicated hedonists to find a discothèque that is functioning clandestinely on the Sabbath. Yes, while Jerusalem is hushed in holy silence, the streets deserted and the shops all shut, Philip Swallow is bopping away under the strobe lights to the sound of the Bee Gees, his silver beard beaded with perspiration, his eyes fixed on Joy’s nipples bouncing under her cheesecloth blouse as she twitches to the same rhythm. Rodney Wainwright knows becaus
e he squeezed into the taxi himself at the last moment, rather than return to the solitary contemplation of his unfinished paper, though he does not dance, and sits gloomily on the edge of the dancefloor all evening, drinking overpriced beer and also watching Joy’s nipples bounce.
The next morning, Rodney does not hear Philip Swallow go whistling down the corridor for his early morning swim, so perhaps at last his excesses are taking their toll. But after breakfast he is down in the lobby with Joy, looking only a little pale and drawn under his tan, all ready for the day’s outing—it is a free day (free, that is, from even a single formal lecture) and an excursion has been arranged to the Dead Sea and Masada.
Rodney Wainwright knows that he ought to give this outing a miss, because his paper is due to be delivered the next morning, and it is still no further forward than when he arrived. He ought to spend the day alone in his room at the Hilton, with a carafe of iced water, working on it. But he knows all too well that he will fritter the day away, tearing up one draft after another, distracted by envious speculation about the fun the others will be having, especially Philip Swallow. Rodney Wainwright accordingly constructs a cunning plot against himself, whereby he will leave the composition of his paper to the last possible moment, viz., tonight, and thus force himself to finish it by the sheer, inexorable pressure of diminishing time.
The sun blazes down out of a cloudless blue sky on the brown, barren landscape. Even inside the air-conditioned bus it is warm. When they step down onto the parking lot of a bathing station on the shore of the Dead Sea, the heat is like the breath of a furnace. They change into their swimming costumes and float—it is impossible to swim—in a dense liquid—you could hardly call it water—the temperature and consistency of soup, so highly seasoned with chemicals that it burns your tongue and throat if you happen to swallow a drop. Afterwards, they are urged by their guide, Sam Singerman, the resident Israeli professor, to cover themselves with the black mud on the beach, which allegedly has health-giving properties; but of the party only Philip and Joy, followed by Morris Zapp and Thelma Ringbaum, have the nerve to do so, daubing each other hilariously with handfuls of the black goo, which dries rapidly in the sun so that they resemble naked aborigines. They rinse the mud off under the shower heads at the back of the beach and Rodney Wainwright follows them into the hot spring baths, which are so agreeable that they keep the others waiting in the bus while they dry and change, a delay for which Thelma Ringbaum is bitterly reproached by her husband.
Masada is, if it is possible, even hotter. After lunch in the inevitable cafeteria, a form of catering that Israel seems to have made its own, they take the cable car up to the ruined fortifications on the heights where the Jewish army of Eleazar committed collective suicide rather than surrender to the Romans in 73 A.D. “I’d rather commit suicide myself than come up here again,” remarks an irreverent visitor, passing into the cable car that Rodney is leaving. The air is certainly no cooler up here—the cable car seems only to have brought them closer to the sun, which beats down relentlessly on the rock and rubble. The tourists stagger about in the heat, barely able to lift their cameras to eye level, looking for scraps of shade behind broken escarpments. Philip Swallow and Joy, hand-in-hand, descend some steps carved in the rock, which curve round the western face of the mountain to a little observation platform that is out of the sun. As they stand at the parapet, looking out over an immense panorama of stony hills and waterless valleys, Philip slides his arm round Joy’s waist. My God, even in this heat he’s still thinking about sex, Rodney says to himself, wiping the perspiration from his face with his rolled-up shirt sleeve. Then Philip Swallow happens to turn in his direction and frowns.
“Enjoying yourself?” he says in a distinctly challenging tone.
“What? Eh?” says Rodney Wainwright, startled. He has hardly exchanged a word with the Englishman all the conference.
“Having a good look? Or should I say, wank?”
“Philip,” Joy murmurs protestingly.
Rodney feels himself blushing hectically. “I don’t know what you’re talking about,” he blusters.
“I’m just about sick and tired of being followed about by you wherever we go,” says Philip Swallow.
Joy makes to move off, but Philip detains her, tightening his grip around her waist. “No,” he says, “I want to have it out with Mr. Wainwright. You told me yourself he spied on you at the hotel the other day.”
“I know,” says Joy, “but I hate scenes.”
“It’s the heat,” says Rodney to Joy, tapping his own forehead illustratively. “He doesn’t know what he’s saying.”
“I bloody well do know,” says Philip Swallow. “I’m saying you’re some kind of pervert. A voyeur.”
“’Ullo, our Dad!”
They all turn round to face a bronzed young man wearing jeans, tee-shirt and a gold stud in one ear, who has approached them by the staircase on the far side of the platform. Now it is Philip Swallow’s turn to look embarrassed. He springs apart from Joy as if he had been burned. “Matthew!” he exclaims. “What in God’s name are you doing here?”
“Working in a kibbutz further up the Jordan,” says the young man. “I hitched out here as soon as I finished me A-Levels, didn’t I?”
“Oh yes,” says Philip, “it comes back to me now.”
“Haven’t been quite with it this summer, have you, Dad?” says the young man, looking curiously at Joy.
“Won’t you introduce me, Philip?” she says.
“What? Oh, yes, of course,” says Philip Swallow, plainly flustered. “This is my son, Matthew. This is, er, Mrs. Simpson, she’s at the conference I’m attending.”
“Oh, uh,” says Matthew.
Joy extends her hand. “How d’you do, Matthew?”
“Perhaps you would like to go back to the cable car with Mr. Wainwright, Mrs. Simpson,” says Philip Swallow quickly. “While I catch up with my son’s news.”
Joy Simpson looks stunned, as if she had received an unexpected slap in the face. She stares at Philip Swallow, opens her mouth to speak, closes it again, and walks away in silence, followed by Rodney Wainwright grinning insanely to himself. He catches her up at the top of the steps. “Do you want to look in at the Museum or go straight back down?” he says.
“I can find my own way back, thank you very much,” she says coldly, standing aside to let him pass.
Philip Swallow seems to go into shock after this episode. As the party boards the bus to return home he complains in Rodney Wainwright’s hearing of feeling feverish, and spends the entire journey with his eyes closed and an expression of suffering on his face, but Joy is silent and unsympathetic, sitting beside him with her own eyes inscrutable behind dark glasses. In the evening Philip does not come down to join the others, who, showered and changed into clean clothes, are gathering in the lobby to go off to a barbecue in Sam Singerman’s garden. Rodney hears Joy telling Morris Zapp that Philip has a temperature. “Heat stroke, I wouldn’t be surprised,” he says, “It sure was hot as hell out there. Too bad he’ll miss the barbecue. You wanna come on your own?” “Why not?” says Joy. Morris Zapp catches Rodney Wainwright’s eye as he hovers a few yards away. “You coming, Wainwright?” Rodney gives a sickly grin: “No, I think I’ll stay in and look over my paper for tomorrow.”
All two and three-quarter pages of it, he thinks bitterly, going off to the elevator, Schadenfreude at Philip Swallow’s discomfiture and indisposition overshadowed by his own approaching ordeal. Tonight is the night. Make or break. Finish the paper or bust. He lets himself into his room and turns on the desk lamp. He takes out his three dogeared, sweat-stained pages of typescript and reads them through for the ninety-fourth time. They are good pages. The prolegomena moves smoothly, confidently, to define the point at issue. “The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism…” Then there is nothing: blank page, white space—or a black hole which seems to have swallowed up his capacity for constructive thought.
The trouble is th
at Rodney Wainwright’s imaginative projection of himself stepping up to the lectern the next morning with only two and three-quarter pages of typescript to last him for fifty minutes, is so vivid, so particular in every psychosomatic symptom of terror, that it hypnotizes him, it paralyses thought, it renders him less capable than ever of continuing with the composition of his paper. He sees himself pausing at the end of his two and three-quarter pages, taking a sip of water, looking at his audience, their faces upturned patiently, expectantly, curiously, restlessly, impatiently, angrily, pityingly…