by David Lodge
Mrs. Zapp was seated next to me at dinner. As we were sitting over the coffee and the ruins of some intolerably sweet chocolate gateau, I tried to stem her flow of intimate reminiscence by teaching the company how to play “Humiliation.” Do you remember that old game? You’ve no idea how difficult it was to get across the basic idea. On the first round they kept naming books they had read and thought everyone else hadn’t. But when they finally got the hang of it, they began to play with almost frightening intensity, especially a young chap called Ringbaum who ended up having a tremendous row with our host and left the house in a huff. The rest of us stayed on for an hour or so, mainly (as far as I was concerned anyway, for I was quite exhausted) to smooth over the awkwardness of this contretemps with Ringbaum.
The bomb, yes, I didn’t think there was any point in worrying you by mentioning it. There’s been no repetition of the incident, though there’s still a good deal of disruption on campus due to the strike. As I write this, sitting in my “office” as they call it, I can hear the chanting of the pickets rising up from Mather gate just below my window, “ON STRIKE, SHUT IT DOWN, ON STRIKE, SHUT IT DOWN!” A very strange sound in an academic environment. Every now and then there is a confrontation at the Gate between the pickets and people trying to get through and then the campus police intervene and occasionally the Plotinus police force too and there’s usually a scuffle and a few arrests. Yesterday the police made a sweep through the campus and students were running in all directions. I was sitting at my desk reading Lycidas when Wily Smith burst into my room and shut the door behind him, leaning against it with closed eyes, just like a film. He was wearing a motor-cycle helmet as protection against the police truncheons (nightsticks as they rather sinisterly call them) and his face was glistening with Vaseline which is supposed to protect your skin against MACE. I asked him what he wanted and he said he wanted a consultation. I had my doubts but dutifully plied him with questions about his ghetto novel. He answered distractedly, his ears cocked for sounds of police activity in the building. Then he asked me if he could use my window. I said, certainly. He threw his leg over the sash and climbed out on to the balcony. After a few minutes I put my head out, but he had disappeared. I suppose he must have found a window open further along the balcony and left that way. The noise gradually faded. I went on reading Lycidas…
I’ve no idea whether I’ve been nominated for a Senior Lectureship and I’d rather keep it that way, since I shan’t then have the mortification of knowing that I was definitely turned down. If Dempsey wants to poke his nose into such matters, let him. I think myself that there’s a lot to be said for the English system of clandestine patronage. Here, for instance, it’s a jungle in which the weakest go to the wall. There’s been the most tremendous row going on all this week about a question of tenure—involving the Ringbaum chap, as it happens—and I’m glad to be well out of it.
You’ll be surprised to learn that Charles Boon is living with me at the moment! He had to leave his previous quarters at short notice due to a fire and I offered to put him up temporarily at the request of his girlfriend, who lives downstairs. I can’t say he’s applied himself very energetically to looking for a new apartment, but he’s not much trouble to me as he sleeps most of the day and is out most of the night.
All my love,
Philip
Morris to Désirée
What does he look like, Désirée, for Christ’s sake? What manner of man is he? Swallow, I mean. Do his canines hang out over his lower lip? Is his handshake cold and clammy? Do his eyes have a murderous glint?
He wrote it, Désirée, he wrote that review, out of pure impersonal spite, one sunny day five years ago he dipped his pen in gall and plunged it into the heart of my lovely article.
I can’t prove it—yet. But the circumstantial evidence is overwhelming.
When I think that you dissuaded him from buying the Corvair … the perfect revenge! Désirée, how could you?
I found a copy of that Festschrift, you see, in his house. In the john, to be exact. A very strange john it is, too, a large room obviously designed originally for some other purpose, perhaps ballroom dancing, in which the WC has been placed on a plinth in one corner. A tiled floor and a small oil lamp burning to prevent the water pipes from freezing give the whole place a slightly spooky ecclesiastical atmosphere. There are books there too, not specially selected reading for the can, but overspill from the rest of the house, which is practically lined with crappy old books stinking of wet-rot and bookworm droppings. The Milestone book has been festering in my subconscious ever since I read that review in the TLS, so I identified its binding and gilt lettering right away. A curious coincidence, I thought to myself, picking the volume off the shelf—for after all it wasn’t exactly a world best-seller—and leafed through it as I sat on the can. Imagine my feelings when I turned to my article and found that the passages which had been marked exactly corresponded to those cited by the TLS reviewer. Imagine the effect on my bowels.
Why don’t you write to me any more, Désirée? I am lonely here these long English nights. Just to give you an idea how lonely I am, this evening I’m going to the English Department’s Staff Seminar to listen to a paper on linguistics and literary criticism.
Love,
Morris
Désirée to Morris
Dear Morris,
If you really want to know, Philip Swallow is about six feet tall and weighs I should say about 140 pounds—that is, he’s tall and skinny and stooped. He holds his head forward as if he’s hit it too often on low doorways. His hair is the texture of Brillo pads before they’ve been used and is deeply receding at the temples. He has dandruff, but who hasn’t? He has nice eyes. I couldn’t say anything positively in favour of his teeth, but they don’t protrude like fangs. His handshake is normal in temperature, if a little on the limp side. He smokes one of those patent air-cooled pipes which leaks tobacco juice all over his fingers.
I had an opportunity to observe all this because I was seated next to him at dinner last Saturday. The Gootblatts invited me. There seems to be a general conspiracy here to pretend that I am lonely in your absence and must be invited out. It turned out to be a fairly sensational evening, with our friend Swallow right in the centre of the action.
Doing his British best to redeem what was looking to be a draggy dinner, he taught us a game he claims to have invented, called “Humiliation.” I assured him I was married to the World Champion, but no, he said, this was a game you won by humiliating yourself. The essence of the matter is that each person names a book which he hasn’t read but assumes the others have read, and scores a point for every person who has read it. Get it? Well, Howard Ringbaum didn’t. You know Howard, he has a pathological urge to succeed and a pathological fear of being thought uncultured, and this game set his two obsessions at war with each other, because he could succeed in the game only by exposing a gap in his culture. At first his psyche just couldn’t absorb the paradox and he named some eighteenth-century book so obscure I can’t even remember the name of it. Of course, he came last in the final score, and sulked. It was a stupid game, he said, and refused to play the next round. “I pass, I pass,” he said sneeringly, like Mrs. Elton on Box Hill (I may not read your books, Zapp, but I remember my Jane Austen pretty good). But I could see he was following the play attentively, knitting his brows and twisting his napkin in his fingers as the point of the game began to dawn on him. It’s quite a groovy game, actually, a kind of intellectual strip poker. For instance, it came out that Luke Hogan has never read Paradise Regained. I mean, I know it isn’t his field, but to think you can get to be Chairman of the English Department at Euphoric State without ever having read Paradise Regained makes you think, right? I could see Howard taking this in, going a bit pale when he realized that Luke was telling the truth. Well, on the third round, Sy was leading the field with Hiawatha, Mr. Swallow being the only other person who hadn’t read it, when suddenly Howard slammed his fist on the table, jutted h
is jaw about six feet over the table and said:
“Hamlet!”
Well, of course, we all laughed, not very much because it didn’t seem much of a joke. In fact it wasn’t a joke at all. Howard admitted to having seen the Lawrence Olivier movie, but insisted that he had never read the text of Hamlet. Nobody believed him of course, and this made him sore as hell. He said did we think he was lying and Sy more or less implied that we did. Upon which Howard flew into a great rage and insisted on swearing a solemn oath that he had never read the play. Sy apologized through tight lips for having doubted his word. By this time, of course, we were all cold sober with embarrassment. Howard left, and the rest of us stood around for a while trying to pretend nothing had happened.
A piquant incident, you must admit—but wait till I tell you the sequel. Howard Ringbaum unexpectedly flunked his review three days later and it’s generally supposed that this was because the English Department dared not give tenure to a man who publicly admitted to not having read Hamlet. The story had been buzzed all round the campus, of course, and there was even a paragraph alluding to it in the Euphoric State Daily. Furthermore, as this created an unexpected vacancy in the Department, they’ve reconsidered the case of Kroop and offered him tenure after all. I don’t suppose he’s read Hamlet either, but nobody was asking. The students are wild with joy. Ringbaum is convinced Swallow conspired to discredit him in front of Hogan. Mr. Swallow himself is blissfully ignorant of his responsibility for the whole drama.
I’m sorry to have to report that the twins’ sudden craze for gardening turned out to be an attempt to cultivate marijuana. I had to root up all the plants and burn them before the cops got wise.
I’m told Melanie hasn’t enrolled this term, so I couldn’t get her address from the University.
Désirée
Hilary to Philip
Dearest,
I had the most frightful shock this morning. Bob Busby rang me up to ask how you were. I said you were fine as far as I knew, and he said, “Jolly good, so he’s out of hospital, then?” and poured out a horrifying story he’d got from some student about how you had been taken hostage by a gang of desperate Black Panthers and held out of a fourth-floor window by your ankles and finally shot in the arm when the police burst into the building blazing away with their guns. It was only about halfway through this lurid tale that I recognized it as a wildly distorted and embroidered version of an anecdote in your last letter which I presumably put into circulation in the first place. I think I must have mentioned it to Janet Dempsey.
Incidentally, Bob told me that Robin took rather a pasting from Morris Zapp at the last Staff Seminar. It seems that Mr. Zapp, despite his somewhat Neanderthal appearance and loutish manners, is really quite clever and knows all about these fashionable people like Chomsky and Saussure and Lévi-Strauss that Robin has been browbeating the rest of you with, or at least enough about them to make Robin look fairly silly. I gather all present derived a certain quiet satisfaction from the proceedings. Anyway, I began to think more kindly of Mr. Zapp, which was rather fortunate for him, as he turned up again yesterday evening to beg a rather odd favour.
It took him some time to get to the point. He kept looking round the room, and asking me about the house and how many bedrooms it had, and wasn’t I lonely living on my own, until I began to fear that he wanted to move in with me. But no, it appeared he was looking for accommodation for a friend, a young lady, and he wondered whether I would consider, as a special favour, letting her rent a room. I told him that we’d had students living in the house once and found it such hell that we’d vowed never to have lodgers again. He looked rather crestfallen at that, so I asked him if he’d looked in the Rummidge papers. He shook his head dolefully and said it was no good, they’d already tried several addresses and nobody would have the girl. People were prejudiced against her, he said. Was she coloured, I asked compassionately. No, he said, she was pregnant.
Well, after what you’d said in your last letter about Mr. Zapp’s reputation, I drew my own conclusions, which must have been pretty clearly written on my face, for he hastily assured me that he was not responsible. He’d met her on the plane coming over, he said, and he was the only person she knew in England, so she’d turned to him for help. She’s an American girl who came to England to get an abortion, but decided at the last moment that she didn’t want to go through with it. She wants to have the baby in England because it would then have dual nationality and if it was a boy he would be able to avoid the draft, should the Viet Nam War still be going on in twenty years’ time. She’d worked illegally for a while in Soho as a waitress, but had to give it up because her pregnancy was beginning to show. And then she had some money stolen.
Well, this story sounded so implausible that I wondered whether he could possibly have invented it. I didn’t know what to think. Where was this girl now, I asked? Outside in his car, he replied, to my astonishment. Well, it was a freezing night, so I told him to bring her inside at once. He was off like a shot and I followed him to the front door. It was like some scene from a Victorian novel, the snow, the fallen woman, etc., but in reverse, because she was coming in instead of going out, if you see what I mean. And I admit to feeling a mite sentimental as she crossed the threshold, with snowflakes melting in her long blonde hair. She was turning blue with cold, poor thing, and practically speechless either from that or shyness. Mary Makepeace is her name. There didn’t seem to be anything else to do but ask her to stay the night, so I made some soup (Professor Zapp wolfed three bowls) and packed her off to bed with a hot water bottle. I told Mr. Zapp I would have her to stay for a few days while they worked out something but that I couldn’t commit myself to having her indefinitely. However, I’m seriously thinking of letting her stay on. She seems to be a very nice girl, and would be company in the evenings. You know I still get frightened in the night sometimes—silly, I know, but there it is. I’ll have to see how we get on on closer acquaintance, of course, and I haven’t made any promises. But if I should be inclined to let Mary stay, I presume you wouldn’t have any objections? She’d pay for her board and lodging, of course—apparently she didn’t lose all her money, and Mr. Zapp was very insistent that he would help financially. I imagine he can afford it. He was driving some incredibly low-slung and expensive-looking orange sports car yesterday, which is to replace the one you didn’t buy.
I hope, by the way, that Charles Boon is making a contribution to your rent. A hint to that effect might be one way of getting rid of him.
All love,
Hilary
PS. Mr. Zapp asked particularly that if I wrote to you about Mary you should regard all information about her as confidential.
Philip to Hilary
Darling,
Just a note in haste to say that I should think very carefully before you take this girl of Zapp’s into the house. And she surely is Zapp’s girl. Whether he’s the father of her child, or not, is another question, but doesn’t affect the likely nature of their relationship. I can understand how you would naturally feel sorry for the girl and want to help, but I think you’ve got to consider yourself in this, and the children, especially Amanda. She’s at a very sensitive and impressionable age now—have you thought of the consequences of having an unmarried mother on the premises? The same goes for Robert, for that matter. I can’t believe that it would be a good thing for the children. Then Zapp would no doubt be in and out of the house all day—and possibly all night too. Have you thought of that? I’m a reasonably tolerant person but I draw the line at providing a room in my house for Mr. Zapp to have it off with his pregnant girlfriend, and I wonder whether you would be able to cope with such a situation, should it arise. Then one has to face the fact, whether one likes it or not, that “people will talk”—and I don’t mean just the neighbours, but the people at the University, too.
All in all, I’m not in favour. But of course you must do what you think best.
The situation is getting uglier here. Some win
dows have been smashed, and catalogue cards in one of the small specialist libraries scattered over the floor. Every lunch hour there is a ritual confrontation which I watch from the balcony outside my room. A large crowd of students, hostile to the police if not positively sympathetic to the strikers, gathers to watch the pickets parading. Eventually someone is jostled, the police intervene, the crowd howls and screams, rocks are thrown, and out of the scrimmage the police come running, dragging some unfortunate student behind them and take him to a temporary lockup under the Administration building, pursued by the hooting mob. Perched up on my safe balcony I feel rather despicable, like those ancient kings who used to watch their set battles from specially built towers. Afterwards one goes home and watches it all over again on the local TV news. And the next morning there are reports and photos in the Euphoric State Daily—that’s the campus paper, produced with incredible speed and professionalism by the students; makes our own once-a-week Rumble seem a rather amateurish effort.
All my love,
Philip
PS. I hope you realize that Mary Makepeace is almost certainly an illegal immigrant in the eyes of the law, and that you could get into trouble for harbouring her?