by David Lodge
Philip Swallow was a man with a genuine love of literature in all its diverse forms. He was as happy with Beowulf as with Virginia Woolf, with Waiting for Godot as with Gammer Gurton’s Needle, and in odd moments when nobler examples of the written word were not to hand he read attentively the backs of cornflakes packets, the small print on railway tickets and the advertising matter in books of stamps. This undiscriminating enthusiasm, however, prevented him from settling on a “field” to cultivate as his own. He had done his initial research on Jane Austen, but since then had turned his attention to topics as various as medieval sermons, Elizabethan sonnet sequences, Restoration heroic tragedy, eighteenth-century broadsides, the novels of William Godwin, the poetry of Elizabeth Barrett Browning and premonitions of the Theatre of the Absurd in the plays of George Bernard Shaw. None of these projects had been completed. Seldom, indeed, had he drawn up a preliminary bibliography before his attention was distracted by some new or revived interest in something entirely different. He ran hither and thither between the shelves of Eng. Lit. like a child in a toyshop—so reluctant to choose one item to the exclusion of others that he ended up empty-handed.
There was one respect alone in which Philip was recognized as a man of distinction, though only within the confines of his own Department. He was a superlative examiner of undergraduates: scrupulous, painstaking, stern yet just. No one could award a delicate mark like B+/B+?+ with such confident aim, or justify it with such cogency and conviction. In the Department meetings that discussed draft question papers he was much feared by his colleagues because of his keen eye for the ambiguous rubric, the repetition of questions from previous years’ papers, the careless oversight that would allow candidates to duplicate material in two answers. His own papers were works of art on which he laboured with loving care for many hours, tinkering and polishing, weighing every word, deftly manipulating eithers and ors, judiciously balancing difficult questions on popular authors with easy questions on obscure ones, inviting candidates to consider, illustrate, comment on, analyse, respond to, make discriminating assessments of or (last resort) discuss brilliant epigrams of his own invention disguised as quotations from anonymous critics.
A colleague had once declared that Philip ought to publish his examination papers. The suggestion had been intended as a sneer, but Philip had been rather taken with the idea—seeing in it, for a few dizzy hours, a heaven-sent solution to his professional barrenness. He visualized a critical work of totally revolutionary form, a concise, comprehensive survey of English literature consisting entirely of questions, elegantly printed with acres of white paper between them, questions that would be miracles of condensation, eloquence and thoughtfulness, questions to read and re-read, questions to brood over, as pregnant and enigmatic as haikus, as memorable as proverbs; questions that would, so to speak, contain within themselves the ghostly, subtly suggested embryos of their own answers. Collected Literary Questions, by Philip Swallow. A book to be compared with Pascal’s Pensées or Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations …
But the project had advanced no further than his more orthodox ones, and meanwhile Rummidge students had begun agitating for the abolition of conventional examinations, so that his one special skill was in danger of becoming redundant. There had been times, lately, when he had begun to wonder whether he was entirely suited to the career on which he had been launched some fifteen years earlier, not so much by personal choice as by the mere impetus of his remarkable First.
He had been awarded a postgraduate studentship automatically and had accepted his Professor’s suggestion that he write an MA thesis on the juvenilia of Jane Austen. After nearly two years his work was still far from completion and, thinking that a change of scene might help, he applied in an idle moment for a Fellowship to America and for an Assistant Lectureship at the University of Rummidge. To his great surprise he was offered both (that First again) and Rummidge generously offered to defer his appointment for a year so that he would not have to choose between them. He didn’t really want to go to America by this time because he had become sentimentally attached to a postgraduate student called Hilary Broome who was working on Augustan pastoral poetry, but he formed the impression that the Fellowship was not an opportunity that could be lightly refused.
So he went to Harvard and was extremely miserable for several months. Because he was working on his own, trying to finish his thesis, he made few friends; because he had no car, and couldn’t drive anyway, he found it difficult to move around freely. Cowardice, and a dim, undefined loyalty to Hilary Broome, prevented him from dating the intimidating Radcliffe girls. He formed the habit of taking long solitary walks through the streets of Cambridge and environs, tailed by police cars whose occupants regarded gratuitous walking as inherently suspicious. The fillings he had prudently taken care to have put in his teeth before leaving the embrace of the National Health Service all fell out and he was informed by a contemptuous Boston dentist that he needed a thousand dollars’ worth of dental work immediately. As this sum was nearly a third of his total stipend, Philip thought he had found the perfect excuse for throwing up his fellowship and returning to England with honour. The Fellowship Fund, however, promptly offered to meet the entire cost from its bottomless funds, so instead he wrote to Hilary Broome asking her to marry him. Hilary, who was growing bored with Augustan pastoral poetry, returned her books to the library, bought a wedding dress off the peg at C&A, and flew out to join him on the first available plane. They were married by an Episcopalian minister in Boston just three weeks after Philip had proposed.
One of the conditions of the Fellowship was that recipients should travel widely in the United States, and Fellows were generously provided with a rented car for the purpose. By way of a honeymoon, and to escape the severity of the New England winter, the young couple decided to start their tour immediately. With Hilary at the wheel of a gigantic brand-new Chevrolet Impala, they headed south to Florida, sometimes pulling off the highway to make fervent love on the amazingly wide back seat. From Florida they crossed the southern States in very easy stages until they reached Euphoria and settled for the summer in an attic apartment on the top of a hill in the city of Esseph. From their double bed they looked straight across the Bay at the verdant slopes of Plotinus, location of the Euphoric State campus.
This long honeymoon was the key that unlocked the American experience for Philip Swallow. He discovered in himself an unsuspected, long repressed appetite for sensual pleasure which he assuaged, not only in the double bed with Hilary, but also with simple amenities of the American way of life, such as showers and cold beer and supermarkets and heated open-air swimming pools and multi-flavoured ice-cream. The sun shone. Philip was relaxed, confident, happy. He learned to drive, and flung the majestic Impala up and down the roller-coaster hills of Esseph with native panache, the radio playing at full volume. He haunted the cellars and satirical night-clubs of South Strand, where the Beats, in those days, were giving their jazz-and-poetry recitals, and felt himself thrillingly connected to the Zeitgeist. He even finished his MA thesis, almost effortlessly. It was the last major project he ever finished.
Hilary was four months pregnant when they sailed back to England in September. It was raining hard the morning they docked at Southampton, and Philip caught a cold which lasted for approximately a year. They rented a damp and draughty furnished flat in Rummidge for six months, and after the baby had arrived they moved to a small, damp and draughty terraced house, from which, three years later, with a second child and another on the way, they moved to a large, damp and draughty Victorian villa. The children made it impossible for Hilary to work, and Philip’s salary was small. Life was riddled with petty privation. So were the lives of most people like the Swallows at this time, and he would not perhaps have repined had he not tasted a richer existence. Sometimes he came across snapshots of himself and Hilary in Euphoria, tanned and confident and gleeful, and, running a hand through his thinning hair, he would gaze at the figures in
envious wonder, as if they were rich, distant relatives whom he had never seen in the flesh.
That is why there is a gleam in Philip Swallow’s eye as he sits now in the BOAC Boeing, sipping his orange juice; why, despite the fact that the plane is shuddering and lurching in the most terrifying manner due to what the captain has just described soothingly over the public address system as “a spot of moderate turbulence,” he would not be anywhere else for the world. Though he has followed the recent history of the United States in the newspapers, though he is well aware, cognitively, that it has become more than ever a violent and melodramatic land, riven by deep divisions of race and ideology, traumatized by political assassinations, the campuses in revolt, the cities seizing up, the countryside poisoned and devastated—emotionally it is still for him a kind of Paradise, the place where he was once happy and free and may be so once again. He looks forward with simple, childlike pleasure to the sunshine, ice in his drinks, drinks, parties, cheap tobacco and infinite varieties of ice-cream; to being called “Professor,” to being complimented on his accent by anonymous telephonists, to being an object of interest simply by virtue of being British; and to exercising again his command of American idiom, grown a little rusty over the years from disuse.
On Philip’s return from his Fellowship, newly acquired Americanisms had quickly withered on his lips under the uncomprehending or disapproving stares of Rummidge students and colleagues. A decade later, and a dash of American usage (both learned and vulgar) had become acceptable—indeed fashionable—in British academic circles, but (it was the story of his life) it was then too late for him to change his style, the style of a thoroughly conventional English don, keeping English up. American idiom still, however, retained for him a secret, subtle enchantment. Was it the legacy of a war-time boyhood—Hollywood films and tattered copies of the Saturday Evening Post having established in those crucial years a deep psychic link between American English and the goodies of which he was deprived by rationing? Perhaps, but there was also a purely aesthetic appeal, more difficult to analyse, a subtle music of displaced accents, cute contractions, quaint redundancies and vivid tropes, which he revives now as the shores of Britain recede and those of America rush to meet him. As a virgin spinster who, legatee of some large and unexpected bequest, heads immediately for Paris and points south and, leaning forward in a compartment of the Golden Arrow, eagerly practises the French phrases she can remember from school-lessons, restaurant menus and distant day-trips to Boulogne; so Philip Swallow, strapped (because of the turbulence) into the seat of his Boeing, lips perceptibly moving but all sound muffled by the hum of the jet engines, tries out on his tongue certain half-forgotten intonations and phrases: “cigarettes … primarily … Swiss on Rye to go … have it checked out … that’s the way the cookie crumbles …”
No virgin spinster, Philip Swallow, a father of three and husband of one, but on this occasion he journeys alone. And a rare treat it is, this absence of dependents—one which, though he is ashamed to admit it, would make him lightsome were his destination Outer Mongolia. Now, for example, the stewardess lays before him a meal of ambiguous designation (could be lunch, could be dinner, who knows or cares four miles above the turning globe) but tempting: smoked salmon, chicken and rice, peach parfait, all neatly compartmentalized on a plastic tray, cheese and biscuits wrapped in cellophane, disposable cutlery, personal salt cellar and pepperpot in dolls’-house scale. He eats everything slowly and with appreciation, accepts a second cup of coffee and opens a pack of opulently long duty-free cigarettes. Nothing else happens. He is not required to cut up anyone else’s chicken, or to guarantee the edibility of smoked salmon; no neighbouring trays spring suddenly into the air or slide resonantly to the floor; his coffee-cup is not dashed from his lips, to deposit its scalding contents in his crotch; his suit collects no souvenirs of the meal by way of buttered biscuit crumbs, smears of peach parfait and dribbles of mayonnaise. This, he reflects, must be what weightlessness is like in space, or the lowered gravity of moon-walks—an unwonted sensation of buoyancy and freedom, a sudden reduction of the effort customarily required by ordinary physical tasks. And it is not just for today, but for six whole months, that it will last. He hugs the thought to himself with guilty glee. Guilty, because he cannot entirely absolve himself of the charge of having deserted Hilary, perhaps even at this moment presiding grimly over the rugged table-manners of the three young Swallows.
It is a consoling thought, in the circumstances, that the desertion was not of his own seeking.
Philip Swallow had never actually applied for the Rummidge-Euphoria exchange scheme, partly out of a well-founded modesty as to his claims, and partly because he had long come to think of himself as too trammelled and shackled by domestic responsibilities to contemplate such adventures. As he had said to Gordon Masters, the Head of his Department, when the latter asked him whether he’d ever thought of applying for the Euphoria Exchange:
“Not really, Gordon. It wouldn’t be fair, you know, to disturb the children’s education at this stage—Robert’s taking the eleven-plus next year, and it won’t be long before Amanda’s in the thick of ‘O’ Levels.”
“Mmmmmmner your own?” Masters replied. This habit of swallowing the first part of his sentences made communication with him a stressful proceeding, as did his way of closing one eye when he looked at you as though taking aim along the barrel of a gun. He was in fact a keen sportsman, and the walls of his room bore plentiful evidence of his marksmanship in the form of silently snarling stuffed animals. The strangled commencements of his sentences, Philip supposed, derived from his service in the Army, where in many utterances only the final word of command is significant. From long practise Philip was able to follow his drift pretty well, and therefore answered confidently:
“Oh, no, I couldn’t leave Hilary behind to cope on her own. Not for six months.”
“Mmmmmmmmnerpose not,” Masters muttered, conveying a certain disappointment or frustration by the way he shifted his weight restlessly from one foot to another. “Mmmmmmmmmmmmmmmnnnnnertunity, though.”
Straining every mental nerve, Philip gradually pieced together the information that the year’s nominee for the Exchange scheme had withdrawn at the last moment because he had been offered a Chair in Australia. It appeared that the Committee concerned was looking rather urgently for a replacement and that Masters (who was Chairman) was prepared to work it for Philip if he was interested. “Mmmmmmmnnnerink about it,” he concluded.
Philip did think about it. All day. With studied casualness he mentioned it to Hilary while they were washing up after dinner.
“You ought to take it,” she said, after a moment’s reflection. “You need a break, a change. You’re getting stale here.”
Philip couldn’t deny it. “What about the children, though? What about Robert’s eleven-plus?” he said, holding a dripping plate like hope in his hands.
Hilary took a longer pause for thought. “You go on your own,” she said at last. “I’ll stay here with the children.”
“No, it wouldn’t be fair,” he protested. “I wouldn’t dream of it.”
“I’ll manage,” she said, taking the plate. “Anyway, it’s quite out of the question for us all to go at such short notice. What would we do about the house, for one thing? You can’t leave this place empty in the winter. And there’s the fares …”
“I must admit,” said Philip, freshening the washing-up water and stirring the suds with gusto, “that if I did go on my own I could probably save quite a lot of money. Enough to pay for the central heating, I should think.”
The installation of central heating in their cold, damp, multi-roomed house had long been an impossible dream of the Swallows. “You go, darling,” said Hilary, with a plucky smile. “You mustn’t miss the opportunity. Gordon might not be Chairman of this committee again.”
“Jolly decent of him to think of me, I must say.”
“You always complain that he doesn’t appreciate you.”<
br />
“I know. I feel I’ve done him rather an injustice.”
Actually, Gordon Masters had decided to back Philip for the Euphoria Exchange because he wanted to give a Senior Lectureship to a considerably younger member of the Department, a very prolific linguistician who was being tempted by offers from the new universities, and it would be less embarrassing to do so while Philip was absent. Philip was not to know this of course, though a less innocent politician might have suspected it.
“You’re sure you don’t mind?” he asked Hilary, and was to ask at least once a day until his departure. He was still at it when she saw him off at Rummidge station. “You’re quite sure you don’t mind?”
“Darling, how many more times? Of course we shall all miss you … And you’ll miss us, I hope?” she teased him mildly.
“Oh, yes, of course.”
But that was the source of his guilt. He didn’t honestly think he would miss them. He bore his children no ill-will, but he thought he could manage quite nicely without them, thank you, for six months. And as for Hilary, well, he found it difficult after all these years to think of her as ontologically distinct from her offspring. She existed, in his field of vision, mainly as a transmitter of information, warnings, requests and obligations with regard to Amanda, Robert and Matthew. If she had been going to America, and himself left at home minding the children, he would have missed her all right. But if there were no children in the picture he couldn’t readily put his finger on any reason why he should be in need of a wife.