by David Lodge
As is perhaps obvious, Morris Zapp had no great esteem for his fellow-labourers in the vineyards of literature. They seemed to him vague, fickle, irresponsible creatures, who wallowed in relativism like hippopotami in mud, with their nostrils barely protruding into the air of common-sense. They happily tolerated the existence of opinions contrary to their own—they even, for God’s sake, sometimes changed their minds. Their pathetic attempts at profundity were qualified out of existence and largely interrogative in mode. They liked to begin a paper with some formula like, “I want to raise some questions about so-and-so,” and seemed to think they had done their intellectual duty by merely raising them. This manoeuvre drove Morris Zapp insane. Any damn fool, he maintained, could think of questions; it was answers that separated the men from the boys. If you couldn’t answer your own questions it was either because you hadn’t worked on them hard enough or because they weren’t real questions. In either case you should keep your mouth shut. One couldn’t move in English studies these days without falling over unanswered questions which some damn fool had carelessly left lying about—it was like trying to mend a leak in an attic full of dusty, broken furniture. Well, his commentary would put a stop to that, at least as far as Jane Austen was concerned.
But the work proceeded slowly; he was not yet halfway through Sense and Sensibility and already it was obvious that each commentary would run to several volumes. Apart from the occasional article, he hadn’t published anything for several years now. Sometimes he would start work on a problem only to remember, after some hours’ cogitation, that he had solved it very satisfactorily himself years before. Over the same period—whether as cause or effect he wasn’t sure—he had begun to feel ill-at-ease in his own body. He was prone to indigestion after rich restaurant meals, he usually needed a sleeping-pill before retiring, he was developing a pot-belly, and he found it increasingly difficult to achieve more than one orgasm in a single session—or so he would complain to his buddies over a beer. The truth was that these days he couldn’t count on making it even once, and Désirée had less cause for resentment than she knew over the baby-sitter last summer. Things weren’t what they used to be in the Zapp loins, though it was a dark truth that he would scarcely admit to himself, let alone to anyone else. He would not publicly acknowledge, either, that he was finding it a strain to hold his students’ attention as the climate on campus became increasingly hostile to traditional academic values. His style of teaching was designed to shock conventionally educated students out of a sloppily reverent attitude to literature and into an ice-cool, intellectually rigorous one. It could do little with students openly contemptuous of both the subject and his own qualifications. His barbed wisecracks sank harmlessly into the protective padding of the new gentle inarticulacy, which had become so fashionable that even his brightest graduate students, ruthless professionals at heart, felt obliged to conform to it, mumbling in seminars, “Well, it’s like James, ah, well the guy wants to be a modern, I mean he has the symbolism bit and God is dead and all, but it’s like he’s still committed to intelligence, like he thinks it all means something for Chrissake—you dig?” Jane Austen was certainly not the writer to win the hearts of the new generation. Sometimes Morris woke sweating from nightmares in which students paraded round the campus carrying placards that declared KNIGHTLEY SUCKS and FANNY PRICE IS A FINK. Perhaps he was getting a little stale; perhaps, after all, he would profit from a change of scene.
In this fashion had Morris Zapp rationalized the decision forced upon him by Désirée’s ultimatum. But, sitting in the airplane beside pregnant Mary Makepeace, all these reasons seemed unconvincing. If he needed a change, he was fairly sure it wasn’t the kind that England would afford. He had neither affection nor respect for the British. The ones he had met—expatriates and visiting professors—mostly acted like fags and then turned out not to be, which he found unsettling. At parties they wolfed your canapés and gulped your gin as if they had just been released from prison, and talked all the time in high, twittering voices about the differences between the English and American university systems, making it clear that they regarded the latter as a huge, rather amusing racket from which they were personally determined to take the biggest possible cut in the shortest possible time. Their publications were vapid and amateurish, inadequately researched, slackly argued, and riddled with so many errors, misquotations, misattributions and incorrect dates that it was amazing they managed to get their own names right on the title page. They nevertheless had the nerve to treat American scholars, including even himself, with sneering condescension in their lousy journals.
He felt in his bones that he wasn’t going to enjoy England: he would be lonely and bored, all the more so because he had taken a small provisional vow not to be unfaithful to Désirée, just to annoy her; and it was the worst possible place to carry on his research. Once he sank into the bottomless morass of English manners, he would never be able to keep the mythic archetypes, the patterns of iterative imagery, the psychological motifs, clear and radiant in his mind. Jane Austen might turn realist on him, as she had on so many other readers, with consequences all too evident in the literature about her.
In Morris Zapp’s view, the root of all critical error was a naive confusion of literature with life. Life was transparent, literature opaque. Life was an open, literature a closed system. Life was composed of things, literature of words. Life was what it appeared to be about: if you were afraid your plane would crash it was about death, if you were trying to get a girl into bed it was about sex. Literature was never about what it appeared to be about, though in the case of the novel considerable ingenuity and perception were needed to crack the code of realistic illusion, which was why he had been professionally attracted to the genre (even the dumbest critic understood that Hamlet wasn’t about how the guy could kill his uncle, or the Ancient Mariner about cruelty to animals, but it was surprising how many people thought that Jane Austen’s novels were about finding Mr. Right). The failure to keep the categories of life and literature distinct led to all kinds of heresy and nonsense: to “liking” and “not liking” books for instance, preferring some authors to others and suchlike whimsicalities which, he had constantly to remind his students, were of no conceivable interest to anyone except themselves (sometimes he shocked them by declaring that, speaking personally on this low, subjective level, he found Jane Austen a pain in the ass). He felt a particularly pressing need to castigate naive theories of realism because they threatened his masterwork: obviously, if you applied an open-ended system (life) to a closed one (literature) the possible permutations were endless and the definitive commentary became an impossibility. Everything he knew about England warned him that the heresy flourished there with peculiar virulence, no doubt encouraged by the many concrete reminders of the actual historic existence of great authors that littered the country—baptismal registers, houses with plaques, second-best beds, reconstructed studies, engraved tombstones and suchlike trash. Well, one thing he was not going to do while he was in England was to visit Jane Austen’s grave. But he must have spoken the thought aloud, because Mary Makepeace asks him if Jane Austen was the name of his great-grandmother. He says he thinks it unlikely.
…
Meanwhile, Philip Swallow is wondering more desperately than ever when this flight is going to end. Charles Boon has been talking at him for hours, it seems, permitting few interruptions. All about the political situation in Euphoria in general and on the Euphoric State campus in particular. The factions, the issues, the confrontations; Governor Duck, Chancellor Binde, Mayor Holmes, Sheriff O’Keene; the Third World, the Hippies, the Black Panthers, the Faculty Liberals; pot, Black Studies, sexual freedom, ecology, free speech, police violence, ghettoes, fair housing, school busing, Viet Nam; strikes, arson, marches, sit-ins, teach-ins, love-ins, happenings. Philip has long since given up trying to follow the details of Boon’s argument, but the general drift seems to be concisely summed up by his lapel buttons:
L
EGALIZE POT
NORMAN O. BROWN FOR PRESIDENT
SAVE THE BAY: MAKE WATER NOT WAR
KEEP THE DRAFT CARDS BURNING
THERE IS A FAULT IN REALITY—NORMAL
SERVICE WILL RETURN SHORTLY
HAPPINESS IS (JUST IS)
KEEP GOD OUT OF AMERICA
BOYCOTT GRAPES
KEEP KROOP
SWINGING SAVES
BOYCOTT TRUFFLES
FUCK D*CK!
In spite of himself, Philip is amused by some of the slogans. Obviously it is a new literary medium, the lapel button, something between the classical epigram and the imagist lyric. Doubtless it will not be long before some post-graduate is writing a thesis on the genre. Doubtless Charles Boon is already doing so.
“What’s your research topic, Boon?” he asks, firmly interrupting an involved legal disquisition on some persecuted group called the Euphoria Ninety-Nine.
“Uh?” Boon looks startled.
“Your PhD—or is it an MA?”
“Oh. Yeah, I’m still getting a Master’s. That’s mostly course work. Just a little baby dissertation.”
“On what?”
“Well, uh, I haven’t decided yet. To tell you the truth, Phil, I don’t have too much time for work, academic work.”
At some point in their conversation Boon has begun calling Philip by his first name, using moreover the contraction he has always detested. Philip resents the familiarity, but can think of no way of stopping him, though he has declined the invitation to address Boon as “Charles.”
“What other kind of work are you doing?” he asks ironically.
“Well, you see, I have this radio show …”
“The Charles Boon Show?” Philip inquires, laughing heartily.
“That’s right, you know about it?”
Boon is not laughing. The same old Boon, barefaced liar, weaver of fantasies. “No,” says Philip. “Do tell me.”
“Oh, it’s just a late-night phone-in programme. You know, people call up and talk about what’s on their mind and ask questions. Sometimes I have a guest. Hey, you must come on the programme one night!”
“Will I get paid?”
“’Fraid not. You get a free tape-recording of the programme and a coloured photograph of the two of us at the mike.”
“Well …” Philip is unsettled by the particularity of the account. Could it conceivably be true? Some campus radio system perhaps? “How often have you done this programme?” he asks.
“Every night, that is morning, for the past year. Midnight till two.”
“Every night! I’m not surprised your studies are suffering.”
“To tell you the truth, Phil, I’m not too bothered about my studies. It suits me to be registered at Euphoric State—it allows me to stay in the country without getting drafted. But I don’t really need any more degrees. I’ve decided my future’s in the media.”
“The Charles Boon Show?”
“That’s just a beginning. I’m having discussions with a TV network right now about starting an experimental arts programme—’s’matter of fact, I’m flying at their expense, they sent me over to look at some European programmes. Then there’s Euphoric Times …”
“What’s that?”
“The underground newspaper. I do a weekly column for them, and now they want me to take over the editorship.”
“The editorship.”
“But I’m thinking of starting a rival paper instead.”
Philip looks searchingly at Boon, whose left eye jumps abruptly to port. Philip relaxes: it is all a pack of lies after all. There is no radio programme, no TV show, no expense account, no newspaper column. It is all wish-fulfilment fantasy, like the Rummidge Research Assistantship and the career in the diplomatic service. Boon has certainly changed—not only in appearance and dress: his manner is more confident, more relaxed, his speech has lost some of its Cockney vowels and glottal stops, he sounds not unlike David Frost. Philip has always supposed he despised David Frost but now realizes that in a grudging kind of way he must respect David Frost quite a lot, so sickening has it been to entertain, even for a moment, the idea that Charles Boon is successfully launched upon a similar career. An extraordinarily plausible fibber, Boon, even after years of close acquaintance he could take you in, it was only the vagrant eye that gave him away. Well, it would make a good story for his first letter home. Who should I meet on the plane but the incorrigible Charles Boon—you remember him, of course, the Parolles of the English Department, graduated a couple of years ago. He was all dolled up in the latest “gear,” with hair down to his shoulders, but as full of tall stories as ever. Patronized me like mad, of course! But he’s so transparent, you can’t take offence.
His train of thought, and Boon’s continuing monologue, are interrupted by an announcement from the captain that they will be landing in approximately twenty minutes, and he hopes they have enjoyed the flight. The instruction to fasten safety belts is illuminated at the front of the cabin.
“Well, Phil, I’d better get back to my seat,” says Boon.
“Yes, well, nice to have met you again.”
“If there’s anything I can do for you, Phil, just call me. My number’s in the book.”
“Yes, well, I have been to America before, you know. But thank you for the offer.”
Boon waves his hand deprecatingly. “Any time, day or night. I have an answering service.”
And to Philip’s astonishment, Charles Boon gets up and walks, unchallenged, past a hovering stewardess, through the curtains that conceal the First Class cabin.
…
“I guess we must be over England, now,” says Mary Makepeace, staring out of the window.
“Is it raining?” Zapp asks.
“No, it’s very clear. You can see all the little fields, like a patchwork quilt.”
“It can’t be England if it’s not raining. We must be off course.”
“There’s a great dark smudge over there. That must be a big city.”
“It’s probably Rummidge. A great dark smudge sounds like Rummidge.”
…
And now, in the two Boeings, falls simultaneously the special silence that precedes an airliner’s landing. The engines are all but cut off, and the conversation of the passengers is hushed as if in sympathy. The planes begin to lose height—clumsily, it seems, in a series of lurching, shuddering drops, as though bumping down an enormous staircase. The passengers swallow to relieve the pressure on their eardrums, close their eyes, finger their passports and vomit-bags. Time passes very slowly. Each person is alone, temporarily, with his own thoughts. But it is hard to think connectedly, swaying and lurching here between heaven and earth. Philip thinks of Hilary smiling bravely and the children waving forlornly on Rummidge station as his train drew away, of an essay that he has forgotten to return to a student, of the probable cost of a taxi from the airport to Plotinus. The future seems frighteningly blank and he has a sudden spasm of homesickness; then he wonders whether the plane will crash, and what it would be like to die and whether there is a God, and where did he put his luggage tickets. Morris Zapp debates whether to stay in London for a few days or go straight to Rummidge and know the worst at once. He thinks of his twins playing secretively in a corner of the yard and breaking off their game reluctantly to say goodbye to him and how Désirée had refused to make love the night before he left, it would have been the first time in months, and remembers the first girl he ever had, Rose Finkelpearl the fish-monger’s daughter on the next block, and how puzzled he’d been when his second girl also reeked faintly of fish, and wonders how many people at the airport will know what this charter has come to England for.
The planes yaw and tilt. A wall of suburbs suddenly rears up behind Mary Makepeace’s head, and falls away again. Cloud swirls round Philip Swallow’s plane and the windows are slashed with rain. Then houses, hills, trees, hangars, trucks, skim by in recognizable scale, like old friends seen again after a long separation.
>
…
Bump!
…
Bump!
…
At exactly the same moment, but six thousand miles apart, the two planes touch down.
2. Settling
Philip Swallow rented an apartment in the top half of a two-storey house high up on Pythagoras Drive, one of many classically-named but romantically-contoured residential roads that corkscrewed their way up and around the verdant hills of Plotinus, Euph. The rent was low, by Euphoric standards, because the house stood on what was called a Slide Area. It had, in fact, already slid twelve feet towards the Bay of Esseph from its original position—a circumstance that had caused the owner hurriedly to vacate it, leasing the accommodation to tenants too indigent, or too careless of life, to complain. Philip fell into neither of these categories, but then he had not learned the full history of 1037 Pythagoras Drive until after signing the six months’ lease. That history had been related to him on the first evening of his occupancy by Melanie Byrd, the prettiest and most wholesome-looking of the three girls who shared the ground-floor apartment, as she kindly explained to him the controls of the communal washing machine in the basement. At first he had felt exploited, but after a while he grew reconciled to the situation. If the apartment was not, after all, surprisingly cheap, it was still cheap; and as Melanie Byrd reminded him, there was no truly safe place to live in Euphoria, whose unique and picturesque landscape was the product of a huge geological fault running through the entire State. It had caused a major earthquake in the nineteenth century, and a repetition of this disaster before the end of the twentieth was confidently predicted by seismologists and local millennial sects: a rare and impressive instance of agreement between science and superstition.