The Campus Trilogy

by David Lodge

  When he drew back the curtains in his living-room each morning, the view filled the picture window like a visual tour de force at the beginning of a Cinerama film. In the foreground, and to his right and left, the houses and gardens of the more affluent Euphoric faculty clung picturesquely to the sides of the Plotinus hills. Beneath him, where the foothills flattened out to meet the Bay shore, was the campus, with its white buildings and bosky paths, its campanile and plaza, its lecture rooms, stadia and laboratories, bordered by the rectilinear streets of downtown Plotinus. The Bay filled the middle distance, stretching out of sight on both sides, and one’s eye naturally travelled in a great sightseeing arc: skimming along the busy Shoreline Freeway, swerving out across the Bay via the long Esseph Bridge (ten miles from toll to toll) to the city’s dramatic skyline, dark downtown skyscrapers posed against white residential hills, from which it leapt across the graceful curves of the Silver Span suspension bridge, gateway to the Pacific, to alight on the green slopes of Miranda County, celebrated for its redwood forests and spectacular sea coast.

  This vast panorama was agitated, even early in the morning, by every known form of transportation—ships, yachts, cars, trucks, trains, planes, helicopters and hovercraft—all in simultaneous motion, reminding Philip of the brightly illustrated cover of a Boy’s Wonder Book of Modern Transport he had received on his tenth birthday. It was indeed, he thought, a perfect marriage of Nature and Civilization, this view, where one might take in at a glance the consummation of man’s technological skill and the finest splendours of the natural world. The harmony he perceived in the scene was, he knew, illusory. Just out of sight to his left a pall of smoke hung over the great military and industrial port of Ashland, and to his right the oil refineries of St. Gabriel fumed into the limpid air. The Bay, which winked so prettily in the morning sun, was, according to Charles Boon and other sources, poisoned by industrial waste and untreated effluent, and was being steadily contracted by unscrupulous dumping and filling.

  For all that, Philip thought, almost guiltily, framed by his living-room window and seen at this distance, the view still looked very good indeed.

  …

  Morris Zapp was less enchanted with his view—a vista of dank back gardens, rotting sheds and dripping laundry, huge, ill-looking trees, grimy roofs, factory chimneys and church spires—but he had discarded this criterion at a very early stage of looking for furnished accommodation in Rummidge. You were lucky, he had quickly discovered, if you could find a place that could be kept at a temperature appropriate to human organisms, equipped with the more rudimentary amenities of civilized life and decorated in a combination of colours and patterns that didn’t make you want to vomit on sight. He considered living in a hotel, but the hotels in the vicinity of the campus were, if anything, even worse than the private houses. Eventually he had taken an apartment on the top floor of a huge old house owned by an Irish doctor and his extensive family. Dr. O’Shea had converted the attic with his own hands for the use of an aged mother, and it was to the recent death of this relative, the doctor impressed upon him, that Morris owed the good fortune of finding such enviable accommodation vacant. Morris didn’t see this as a selling point himself, but O’Shea seemed to think that the apartment’s sentimental associations were worth at least an extra five dollars a week to an American torn from the bosom of his own family. He pointed out the armchair in which his mother had suffered her fatal seizure and, while bouncing on the mattress to demonstrate its resilience, contrived at the same time to reflect with a mournful sigh that it was scarcely a month since his beloved parent had passed to her reward from this very bed.

  Morris took the flat because it was centrally heated—the first he had seen thus blessed. But the heating system turned out to be one of electric radiators perversely and unalterably programmed to come on at full blast when you were asleep and to turn themselves off as soon as you got up, from which time they leaked a diminishing current of lukewarm air into the frigid atmosphere until you were ready to go to bed again. This system, Dr. O’Shea explained, was extremely economical because it ran on half-price electricity, but it still seemed to Morris an expensive way to work up a sweat in bed. Fortunately the apartment was well provided with gas burners of antique design, and by keeping them on at full volume all day he was able to maintain a tolerable temperature in his rooms, though O’Shea evidently found it excessive, entering Morris’s apartment with his arm held up to shield his face, like a man breaking into a burning house.

  Simply keeping warm was Morris Zapp’s main preoccupation in his first few days at Rummidge. On his first morning, in the tomb-like hotel room he had checked into after driving straight from London airport, he had woken to find steam coming out of his mouth. It had never happened to him indoors before and his first thought was that he was on fire. When he had moved his baggage into the O’Shea house, he filled the micro-refrigerator with TV dinners, locked his door, turned up all the fires and spent a couple of days thawing out. Only then did he feel ready to investigate the Rummidge campus and introduce himself to the English Department.

  …

  Philip Swallow was more impatient to inspect his place of work. On his very first morning he strolled out after a delicious breakfast of orange juice, bacon, hot cakes and maple syrup (maple syrup! how delightful it was to recover such forgotten sensations) to look for Dealer Hall, the location of the English Department. It was raining, as it had been the previous day. This had been a disappointment to Philip initially—in his memory Euphoria was bathed in perpetual sunlight, and he had forgotten—perhaps he had never known—that it had a rainy season in the winter months. It was, however, a fine, soft rain, and the air was warm and balmy. The grass was green, the trees and shrubs were in full leaf and, in some cases, flower and fruit. There was no real winter in Euphoria—autumn joined hands with spring and summer, and together they danced a three-handed jig all year long, to the merry confusion of the vegetable world. Philip felt his pulse beating to its exhilarating rhythm.

  He had no difficulty in finding his way to Dealer Hall, a large, square building in the neoclassical style. He was prevented from entering it, however, by a ring of campus policemen. Quite a lot of students and staff were milling about, and a long-haired youth with a KEEP KROOP button in the lapel of his suede jacket informed Philip that the building was being checked out for a bomb allegedly planted during the night. The search, he understood, might take several hours; but as he was turning away it ended quite suddenly with a muffled explosion high up in the building and a tinkle of shattered glass.

  …

  As Morris Zapp learned much later, he made a bad impression on his first appearance in the Rummidge English Department. The Secretary, young Alice Slade, returning from her coffee break with her friend Miss Mackintosh of Egyptology, observed him doubled up in front of the Departmental noticeboard, coughing and wheezing and blowing cigar ash all over the floor. Miss Slade had wondered whether it was a mature student having a fit and asked Miss Mackintosh to run and fetch the porter, but Miss Mackintosh ventured the opinion that he was only laughing, which was indeed the case. The noticeboard distantly reminded Morris of the early work of Robert Rauschenberg: a thumb-tacked montage of variegated scraps of paper—letterheaded notepaper, memo sheets, compliment slips, pages torn clumsily from college notebooks, inverted envelopes, reversed invoices, even fragments of wrapping paper with tails of scotch tape still adhering to them—all bearing cryptic messages from faculty to students about courses, rendezvous, assignments and books, scribbled in a variety of scarcely decipherable hands with pencil, ink and coloured ball-point. The end of the Gutenberg era was evidently not an issue here: they were still living in a manuscript culture. Morris felt he understood more deeply, now, what McLuhan was getting at: it had tactile appeal, this noticeboard—you wanted to reach out and touch its rough, irregular surface. As a system for conveying information it was the funniest thing he’d seen in years.

  Morris was still chuckling to hi
mself as the mini-skirted secretary, looking, he thought, rather nervously over her shoulder from time to time, led him down the corridor to his office. Walking along the corridors of Dealer Hall was like passing through some Modern Language Association Hall of Fame, but he recognized none of the nameplates here except the one on the door Miss Slade finally stopped at: MR. P. H. SWALLOW. That rang a distant bell—but, he recalled, as the girl fumbled with the key (she seemed very jumpy, this chick), it wasn’t in print that he had encountered the name, merely in the correspondence about his trip. Swallow was the guy he was exchanging with. He recalled Luke Hogan, present Chairman of Euphoric’s English Department, holding a letter from Swallow in his enormous fist (a handwritten letter, again, it came back to him) and complaining in his Montana cowboy’s drawl, “Goddammit, Morris, what are we gonna do with this guy Swallow? He claims he ain’t got a field.” Morris had recommended putting Philip down to teach English 99, a routine introduction to the literary genres and critical method for English majors, and English 305, a course in novel-writing. As Euphoric State’s resident novelist, Garth Robinson, was in fact very rarely resident, orbiting the University in an almost unbroken cycle of grants, fellowships, leaves of absence and alcoholic cures, the teaching of English 305 usually fell to some unwilling and unqualified member of the regular teaching staff. As Morris said, “If he makes a fuck-up of English 305, nobody’s going to notice. And any clown with a PhD should be able to teach English 99.”

  “He doesn’t have a PhD,” Hogan said.

  “What?”

  “They have a different system in England, Morris. The PhD isn’t so important.”

  “You mean the jobs are hereditary?”

  Recollecting all this reminded Morris that he had not been able to prise any information about his own teaching programme from Rummidge before leaving Euphoria.

  The girl finally got the door open and he went in. He was pleasantly surprised: it was a large, comfortable room, well-furnished with desk, table, chairs and bookshelves of matching polished wood, an armchair and a rather handsome rug. Above all, it was warm. Morris Zapp was to experience the same sense of surprise and paradox many times in his first weeks at Rummidge. Public affluence and private squalor, was how he formulated it. The domestic standard of living of the Rummidge faculty was far below that of the Euphoric faculty, but even the most junior teacher here had a large office to himself, and the Staff House was built like a Hilton, putting Euphoric State’s Faculty Club quite in the shade. Even the building in which Morris’s office was situated had its own spacious and comfortable lounge, restricted to faculty, where you could get fresh coffee and tea served in real china cups and saucers by two motherly women, whereas Dealer Hall boasted only a small room littered with paper cups and cigarette ends where you fixed yourself instant coffee that tasted like hot disinfectant. “Public affluence” was perhaps too flattering to Rummidge, and it couldn’t be the socialism he’d heard so much about, either. It was more like a narrow band of privilege running through the general drabness and privation of life. If the British university teacher had nothing else, he had a room he could call his own, a decent place to sit and read his newspaper and the use of a john that was off-limits to students. That seemed to be the underlying principle. Such coherent thoughts were not yet forming in Morris Zapp’s mind, however, as he first cast his eyes round Philip Swallow’s room. He was still in a state of culture shock, and it gave him a giddy feeling when he looked out of the window and saw the familiar campanile of Euphoric State flushed an angry red and shrunk to half its normal size, like a detumescent penis.

  “It’s a bit stuffy in here, I’m afraid,” said the secretary, making a move to open a window. Morris, already basking in the radiator’s warmth, lurched with clumsy haste to prevent her, and she shrank back, quivering, as if he had been about to put his hand up her skirt—which, given its dimensions, wouldn’t have been difficult, it could easily happen accidentally just shaking hands with her. He tried to soothe her by making conversation.

  “Don’t seem to be many people on campus today.”

  She looked at him as if he had just arrived from outer space. “It’s the vacation,” she said.

  “Uhuh. Is Professor Masters around?”

  “No, he’s in Hungary. Won’t be back till the beginning of term.”

  “At a conference?”

  “Shooting wild pigs, I’m told.”

  Morris wondered if he had heard aright, but let it go. “What about the other professors?”

  “There’s only the one.”

  “I mean the other teachers.”

  “It’s the vacation,” she repeated, speaking with deliberation, as if to a slow-witted child.

  “You do get them coming in from time to time, but I’ve not seen anybody this morning.”

  “Who should I see about my teaching programme?”

  “Dr. Busby did say something about it the other day …”

  “Yes?” Morris prompted, after a pause.

  “I’ve forgotten, now,” said the girl dejectedly. “I’m leaving in the summer to get married,” she added, as if she had decided on this course as the only way out of a hopeless situation.

  “Congratulations. Would there be a file on me somewhere?”

  “Well, there might be. I could have a look,” said the girl, obviously relieved to escape. She left Morris alone in his office.

  He sat down at the desk and opened the drawers. In the top right-hand one was an envelope addressed to himself. It contained a long hand-written letter from Philip Swallow.

  Dear Professor Zapp,

  I gather you’ll be using my room while you’re here. I’m afraid I’ve lost the key to the filing cabinet, so if you have anything really confidential I should keep it under the carpet, at least I always do. Do feel free to use my books, though I’d be grateful if you wouldn’t lend them to students, as they will write in them.

  I gather from Busby that you’ll probably be taking over my tutorial groups. The second-year groups are rather hard going, especially the Joint Honours, but the first-year group is quite lively, and I think you’ll find the two final-year groups very interesting. There are a few points you might like to bear in mind. Brenda Archer suffers badly from pre-menstrual tension so don’t be surprised if she bursts into tears every now and again. The other third-year group is tricky because Robin Kenworth used to be Alice Murphy’s boy-friend but lately he’s been going around with Miranda Watkins, and as they’re all in the same group you may find the atmosphere rather tense…

  The letter continued in this vein for several pages, describing the emotional, psychological and physiological peculiarities of the students concerned in intimate detail. Morris read through it in total bewilderment. What kind of a man was this, that seemed to know more about his students than their own mothers? And to care more, by the sound of it.

  He opened the other drawers in the desk, hoping to find further clues to this eccentric character, but they were empty except for one containing a piece of chalk, an exhausted ball-point, two bent pipe-cleaners and a small, empty can that had once contained an ounce of pipe tobacco, Three Nuns Empire Blend. Sherlock Holmes might have made something of these clues … Morris moved on to examine the cupboards and bookshelves. The books did no more than confirm Swallow’s confession that he had no particular scholarly field, being a miscellaneous collection of English literature, with a thin representation of modern criticism, Morris’s own not included. He established that the cupboards were empty, except for one at the top of the bookshelves which was too high for him to reach. Its inaccessibility convinced Morris that it contained the revelation he was looking for—a dozen empty gin bottles, for instance, or a collection of women’s underwear—and he clambered on to a chair to reach the catch of the sliding door. It was stuck, and the whole bookshelf began to sway dangerously as he tugged. The catch suddenly gave, however, and a hundred and fifty-seven empty tobacco cans, Three Nuns Empire Blend, fell on his head.


  …

  “You’ve been allocated room number 426,” said Mabel Lee, the petite Asian secretary. “That’s Professor Zapp’s office.”

  “Yes,” said Philip. “He’ll be using my room at Rummidge.”

  Mabel Lee gave him an amiable, but non-attending smile, like that of an air-hostess—whom, indeed, she resembled, in her crisp white blouse and scarlet pinafore dress. The Departmental Office was full of people just admitted to the building, loudly discussing the bomb which had exploded in the fourth-floor men’s room. Opinion seemed to be fairly evenly divided between those who blamed the Third World Students who were threatening to strike in the coming quarter, and those who suspected police provocateurs aiming to discredit the Third World Students and their strike. Though the conversation was excited, Philip missed the expected note of outrage and fear.

  “Does, er, this sort of thing… happen often?” he asked.

  “Hmm? Oh, yeah. Well, I guess it’s the first bomb we’ve had in Dealer.” With this ambiguous reassurance Mabel Lee proceeded to hand over the keys to his room, together with a wad of forms and leaflets which she briskly explained to him, dealing them out on the counter that divided the room: “Identity Card, don’t forget to sign it, application for car parking, medical insurance brochures—choose any one plan, typewriter rental application—you can have electric or manual, course handbook, income tax immunity form, key to the elevator in this building, key to the Xerox room, just sign your name in the book each time you use the machine… I’ll tell Professor Hogan you’ve arrived,” she concluded. “He’s busy with the Fire Chief right now. I know he’ll call you.”