by David Lodge
Philip found his room on the fourth floor. A sallow youth with a mop of frizzy hair was squatting outside, smoking a cigarette. He was wearing some kind of army combat jacket with camouflage markings and he looked, Philip couldn’t help thinking, just the sort of chap who might plant a bomb somewhere. As Philip fitted his key into the Yale lock, he scrambled to his feet. A fluorescent KEEP KROOP button glowed on his lapel.
“Professor Swallow?”
“Yes?”
“Could I see you?”
“What, now?”
“Now would be great.”
“Well, I’ve only just arrived…”
“You have to run that key twice.”
This was true. The door opened suddenly and Philip dropped some of his papers. The young man picked them up adroitly and made this an opportunity to follow him into the room. It was stuffy, and smelled of cigars. Philip threw up the window and observed with satisfaction that it opened on to a narrow balcony.
“Nice view,” said the youth, who had stolen up silently behind him. Philip started.
“What can I do for you, Mr. er… ?”
“Smith. Wily Smith.”
“Willy?”
“Wily.”
Wily perched himself on the only part of the desk that was not covered with books. Philip’s first thought was that it was rather careless of the Zapp fellow to leave his room so untidy. Then he registered that many of the books were still in unwrapped postal packaging and addressed to himself. “Good Lord,” he said.
“What’s the problem, Professor Swallow?”
“These books… Where have they come from?”
“Publishers. They want you to assign them for courses.
“And what if I don’t?”
“You keep them anyway. Unless you want to sell them. I know a guy will give you fifty per cent of the list price…”
“No, no,” Philip protested, greedily tearing the wrappers from huge, heavy anthologies and sleek, seductive paperbacks. A free book was a rare treat in England, and the sight of all this unsolicited booty made him slightly delirious. He rather wished Wily Smith would leave him to gloat in solitude.
“What is it you want to see me about, Mr. Smith?”
“You’re teaching English 305 next quarter, right?”
“I really don’t know what I’m teaching yet. What is English 305?”
“Novel-writing.”
Philip laughed. “Well, it’s certainly not me, then. I couldn’t write a novel to save my life.”
Wily Smith frowned and, plunging his hand inside his combat jacket, produced what Philip feared might be a bomb but which turned out to be a catalogue of courses. “English 305,” he read out, “an advanced course in the writing of extended narrative. Selective enrolment. Winter Quarter: Professor Philip Swallow.”
Philip took the catalogue from his hands and read for himself. “Good Lord,” he said weakly. “I must stop this at once.”
With Wily Smith’s assistance he telephoned the Chairman of the Department.
“Professor Hogan, I’m sorry to bother you so soon, but—”
“Mr. Swallow!” Hogan’s voice boomed out of the receiver. “Mighty glad to hear you arrived. Have a good flight?”
“Not at all bad, thank you. I—”
“Fine! Where are you staying, Mr. Swallow?”
“At the Faculty Club for the time being, while I look—”
“Fine, that’s fine, Mr. Swallow. You and I must have lunch together real soon.”
“Well, that would be very nice, but what I—”
“Fine. And while I think of it, Mrs. Hogan and I are having some folks round for drinks on Sunday, ’bout five, could you make it?”
“Well, yes, thank you very much. About my courses—”
“Fine. That’s just fine. And how are you settling in, Mr. Swallow?”
“Oh, fine, thanks,” said Philip mechanically. “I mean, no, that is—” But he was too late. With a last “Fine,” Hogan had rung off.
“So do I get into the course?” said Wily Smith.
“I would strongly advise you against it,” said Philip. “Why are you so keen, anyway?”
“I have this novel I want to write. It’s about this black kid growing up in the ghetto…”
“Isn’t that going to be rather difficult?” said Philip. “I mean, unless you actually are…”
Philip hesitated. He had been instructed by Charles Boon that “black” was the correct usage these days, but he found himself unable to pronounce a word associated in Rummidge with the crudest kind of racial prejudice. “Unless you’ve had the experience yourself,” he amended his sentence.
“Sure. Like the story is autobiographical. All I need is technique.”
“Autobiographical?” Philip scrutinized the young man, narrowing his eyes and cocking his head to one side. Wily Smith’s complexion was about the shade of Philip’s own a week after his summer holiday, when his tan would begin to fade and turn yellow. “Are you sure?”
“Sure I’m sure.” Wily Smith looked hurt, not to say insulted.
Philip hastily changed the subject: “Tell me, that badge you’re wearing—what is Kroop?”
Kroop turned out to be the name of an Assistant Professor in the English Department who had recently been refused tenure. “But there’s a grass-roots movement to have him kept on here,” Wily explained. “Like he’s a real groovy teacher and his classes are very popular. The other professors make out he hasn’t published enough, but really they’re sick as hell because of the raves he gets in the Course Bulletin.”
And what was that? It was apparently a kind of consumers’ guide to teachers and courses based on questionnaires handed out to students in previous quarters. Wily produced the current issue from one of his capacious pockets.
“You won’t be in there, Professor Swallow. But you will next quarter.”
“Really?” Philip opened the book at random.
English 142. Augustan Pastoral Poetry. Asst. Professor Howard
Ringbaum. Juniors and Seniors. Limited enrolment.
Ringbaum, according to most reports, does little to make his subject interesting to students. One commented: “He seems to know his material very well, but resents questions and discussion as they interrupt his train of thought.” Another comment: “Dull, dull, dull.” Ringbaum is a strict grader and, according to one report, “likes to set insidious little quizzes.”
“Well,” said Philip with a nervous smile. “They certainly don’t mince their words, do they?” He leafed through other pages on English courses.
English 213. The Death of the Book? Communication and Crisis in Contemporary Culture. Asst. Professor Karl Kroop. Limited enrolment.
Rise early on Enrolment Day to sign on for this justly popular interdisciplinary multi-media head-trip. “Makes McLuhan seem slow,” was one comment, and another raved: “the most exciting course I have ever taken.” Heavy reading assignments, but flexible assessment system. Kroop takes an interest in his students, is always available.
“Who compiles these reports?” Philip inquired.
“I do,” said Wily Smith. “Do I get into your course?”
“I’ll think about it,” said Philip. He continued to browse.
English 350. Jane Austen and the Theory of Fiction. Professor Morris J. Zapp. Graduate Seminar. Limited enrolment.
Mostly good reports of this course. Zapp is described as vain, sarcastic and a mean grader, but brilliant and stimulating. “He makes Austen swing,” was one comment. Only “A” students need apply.
…
Miss Slade was just about to knock on Morris Zapp’s door to inform him that there was nothing in the files about his teaching programme, when she heard the noise of the hundred and fifty-seven tobacco cans falling out of the cupboard. He listened to the sound of her high heels fleeing down the corridor. She did not return. Neither did anyone else violate his privacy.
Morris came into the University most days to work on
his Sense and Sensibility commentary and at first he appreciated the peace and quiet; but after a while he began to find these amenities oppressively absolute. In Euphoria he was constantly being pursued by students, colleagues, administrators, secretaries. He didn’t expect to be so busy at Rummidge, at least not initially; but he had vaguely supposed the faculty would introduce themselves, show him around, offer the usual hospitality and advice. In all modesty Morris imagined he must be the biggest fish ever to swim into this academic backwater, and he was prepared for a reception of almost exaggerated (if that were possible) interest and excitement. When nobody showed, he didn’t know what to do. He had lost the art, cultivated in youth, of making his existence known to people. He was used, by now, to letting the action come to him. But there was no action.
As the beginning of term approached, the Departmental corridor lost its tomb-like silence, its air of human desertion. The faculty began to trickle back to their posts. From behind his desk he heard them passing in the corridor, greeting each other, laughing and opening and shutting their doors. But when he ventured into the corridor himself they seemed to avoid him, bolting into their offices just as he emerged from his own, or else they looked straight through him as if he were the man who serviced the central heating. Just when he had decided that he would have to take the initiative by ambushing his British colleagues as they passed his door at coffee-time and dragging them into his office, they began to acknowledge his presence in a way which suggested long but not deep familiarity, tossing him a perfunctory smile as they passed, or nodding their heads, without breaking step or their own conversations. This new behaviour implied that they all knew perfectly well who he was, thus making any attempt at self-introduction on his part superfluous, while at the same time it offered no purchase for extending acquaintance. Morris began to think that he was going to pass through the Rummidge English Department without anyone actually speaking to him. They would fend him off for six months with their little smiles and nods and then the waters would close over him and it would be as if he had never disturbed their surface.
Morris felt himself cracking under this treatment. His vocal organs began to deteriorate from disuse—on the rare occasions when he spoke, his own voice sounded strange and hoarse to his ears. He paced his office like a prisoner in his cell, wondering what he had done to provoke this treatment. Did he have halitosis? Was he suspected of working for the CIA?
In his lonely isolation, Morris turned instinctively for solace to the media. He was at the best of times a radio and TV addict: he kept a radio in his office at Euphoric State tuned permanently to his favourite FM station, specializing in rock-soul ballads; and he had a colour TV in his study at home as well as in the living-room because he found it easier to work while watching sports broadcasts at the same time. (Baseball was most conducive to a ready flow of words, but football, hockey and basketball would also serve.) He rented a colour TV soon after moving into his apartment in Rummidge, but the programmes were disappointing, consisting mainly of dramatizations of books he had already read and canned American series he had already seen. There was, naturally, no baseball, football, hockey or basketball. There was soccer, which he thought he might get interested in, given time—he sniffed, there, the mixture of spite and skill, gall and grace, which characterized an authentic spectator sport—but the amount of screen time devoted to it was meagre. There was a four-hour programme of sport on Saturday afternoons which he had settled down to watch expectantly, but it seemed to be some kind of conspiracy to drive the population out to the soccer stadiums or to the supermarkets or anywhere rather than watch ladies’ archery, county swimming championships, a fishing contest and a table-tennis tournament all in breathtaking succession. He switched on to the other channel and that seemed to be a cross-country race for wheel-chairs, as far as you could tell through the sleet.
He had a brief honeymoon with Radio One that turned into a kind of sadomasochistic marriage. Waking early in the Rummidge hotel on that morning when his breath turned to steam, he had flicked on his transistor and listened to what he took, at the time, to be a very funny parody of the worst kind of American AM radio, based on the simple but effective formula of having non-commercial commercials. Instead of advertising products, the disc-jockey advertised himself—pouring out a torrent of drivel generally designed to convey what a jolly, amusing and lovable guy he was—and also advertised his listeners, every one of whose names and addresses he seemed determined to read out over the air, plus, on occasion, their birthdays and car registration numbers. Now and again he played musical jingles in praise of himself or reported, in tones of unremitting jollity, a multiple accident on the freeway. There was almost no time left for playing records. It was a riot. Morris thought it was a little early in the morning for satire, but listened entranced. When the programme finished and was followed by one of exactly the same kind, he began to get restive. The British, he thought, must be gluttons for satire: even the weather forecast seemed to be some kind of spoof, predicting every possible combination of weather for the next twenty-four hours without actually committing itself to anything specific, not even the existing temperature. It was only after four successive programmes of almost exactly the same formula—DJ’s narcissistic gabble, lists of names and addresses, meaningless anti-jingles—that the awful truth dawned on him: Radio One was like this all the time.
Morris’s only human contact these lonely days was Doctor O’Shea, who came in to watch Morris’s colour TV and to drink his whisky, and perhaps to escape the joys of family life for an hour or so, because he knocked softly on the door and tiptoed into the room, winking heavily and raising a cautionary finger as if to restrain Morris from speaking until the door was shut against the wails of Mrs. O’Shea and her babies rising up the staircase. O’Shea puzzled Morris. He didn’t look like a doctor, not like the doctors Morris knew—sleek prosperous men who drove the biggest cars and owned the plushest houses in any neighbourhood he had ever lived in. O’Shea’s suit was baggy and threadbare, his shirts were frayed, he drove a small car that had seen better days, he looked short of sleep, money, pleasures, everything except worries. By the same token Morris’s possessions, few as they were, seemed to throw the doctor into fits of envious awe, as if his eyes had never beheld such opulence. He examined Morris’s Japanese cassette recorder with the half-fearful, half-covetous curiosity of a nineteenth-century savage handling a missionary’s tinder-box; he seemed astounded that a man might own so many shirts that he could send them to the laundry half-a-dozen at a time; and, invited to fix himself a drink, he was almost (but not quite) incapable of making a choice from three varieties of whisky, groaning and muttering under his breath as he handled the bottles and read the labels, “Mother of God, what is it we have here, Old Grandad Genuine Kentucky Bourbon and here’s th’old josser himself looking none the worse for it, would you believe it…”
The installation of the colour TV had made Dr. O’Shea quite ill with excitement. He followed the delivery men up the stairs and skipped around the room getting in their way and sat enraptured before the tuning signal for hours after they left, getting up now and again to lay his hand reverently on the cabinet as if he expected to derive some special grace from the contact. “Sure, if I hadn’t seen it with me own eyes I shouldn’t have believed it,” he said with a sigh. “You’re a fortunate man, Mr. Zapp.”
“But I just rented it,” Morris protested in bewilderment. “Anybody can rent one. It only costs a few dollars a week.”
“Well, now, that’s easily said, Mr. Zapp, for a man in your position, that’s easily said, but easier said than done, Mr. Zapp.”
“Well, if there’s anything you want to see, just drop by…”
“That’s very kind of you, Mr. Zapp, very thoughtful. I’ll take you up on that generous invitation.” And so he did. Unfortunately, O’Shea’s tastes in TV ran to situation comedy and sentimental serials, to which he reacted with naive, unqualified credulity, writhing and jumping up and down i
n his seat, pounding the arm of his chair and nudging Morris vigorously in the ribs, maintaining a stream of highly personal commentary on the action: “Ahah! Caught you there, laddie, you weren’t expecting that… Oh! What’s this, what’s this, you little hussy? Ah, now, that’s better, that’s better… NO, DON’T DO IT! DON’T DO IT! Mother of God, that boy will be the death of me…” and so on. Fortunately, Dr. O’Shea usually fell asleep halfway through the programme, exhausted by the strains of audience participation and the rigours of the day’s labours, and Morris would turn down the sound and get out a book. It wasn’t exactly company.
…
To his considerable mortification, Philip Swallow’s chief social asset at Euphoric State turned out to be his association with Charles Boon. He carelessly let this information slip in conversation with Wily Smith and, within hours it seemed, the news had been flashed to all points of the campus. His office began to fill up with people anxious to make his acquaintance for the sake of some anecdote of Charles Boon’s early life, and before the end of the afternoon the Chairman’s wife, Mrs. Hogan, had phoned to plead for Philip’s assistance in persuading Boon to attend their cocktail party. It was hard to believe, but the Charles Boon Show was all the rage at Euphoric State. Philip listened to it at the first opportunity, and, by some kind of sadomasochistic compulsion, at most subsequent opportunities.
The basic formula of the programme—an open line on which listeners could call up to discuss various issues with the compère and with each other—was a familiar one. But the Charles Boon Show was different from the ordinary phone-in programme in several respects. To begin with, it was put out by the non-commercial network, QXYZ, which was supported by listeners’ subscriptions and foundation grants, and was therefore free from business and political pressures. Where the compères of most American phone-in programmes were bland, evasive, middle-of-the-road men, giving a fair hearing to all sides of the question—endlessly patient, endlessly courteous, ultimately without convictions—Charles Boon was violently, wilfully opinionated. Where they provided the reassurance of a surrogate father or uncle, he offered the provocation of a delinquent-son-figure. He took an extreme radical position on all such issues as pot, sex, race, Viet Nam, and argued heatedly—often rudely—with callers who disagreed with him, sometimes abusing his control of the telephone line by cutting them off in mid-sentence. It was rumoured that he collected the phone numbers of likely-sounding girls and called them back after the programme to make dates. He would sometimes begin a programme by quoting a passage of Wittgenstein or Camus or by reading a poem of his own composition, and use this as a starting point for a dialogue with his listeners. And an extraordinary variety of listeners they were, those who faithfully tuned into QXYZ at midnight—students, professors, hippies, runaways, insomniacs, drug addicts and Hells Angels. Housewives sitting up for laggard husbands confided their marital problems to the Charles Boon Show; truck-drivers listening to the programme in their shuddering cabs, unable to suppress their rage at Boon, or Camus, any longer, swerved off the freeway to phone in their incoherent contributions from emergency call-boxes. Already a considerable folk-lore had accumulated about the Charles Boon Show, and Philip was regaled with the highlights of certain past programmes so often that he came to believe that he had heard them himself: the time, for instance, Boon had talked a panic-stricken pregnant mother through her first labour-pains, or when he argued a homosexual clergyman out of suicide, or when he invited—and obtained—postcoital reflections on the Sexual Revolution from bedside telephones around the Bay. There were, of course, no commercials on the progamme, but just to annoy the rival networks Boon would sometimes give an unsolicited and unpaid testimonial to some local restaurant or movie or shirt-sale that had taken his fancy. To Philip it seemed obvious that beneath all the culture and the eccentricity and the human concern there beat a heart of pure show-business, but to the local community the programme evidently appeared irresistibly novel, daring and authentic.