by David Lodge
The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism maintain its Arnoldian function of identifying the best which has been thought and said, when literary discourse itself has been decentred by deconstructing the traditional concept of the author, of authority?
Rodney Wainwright inserts a pair of inverted commas around “authority” and wills his mind to think of the next sentence. The paper must be finished soon, for Morris Zapp has asked to see a draft before accepting it for the conference, and on acceptance depends the travel grant which will enable Rodney Wainwright to fly to Europe this summer (or rather winter), to refresh his mind at the fountainhead of modern critical thought, making useful and influential contacts, adding to the little pile of scholarly honours, distinctions, achievements, that may eventually earn him a chair at Sydney or Melbourne. He does not want to grow old in Cooktown, Queensland. It is no country for old men. Even now, at thirty-eight, he stands no chance with the likes of Sandra Dix beside the bronzed and bulging heroes of the beach. The effects of twenty years’ dedication to the life of the mind are all too evident when he puts on a pair of swimming trunks, however loosely cut: beneath the large, balding, bespectacled head is a pale, pear-shaped torso, with skinny limbs attached like afterthoughts in a child’s drawing. And even if by some miracle Sandra Dix should be inclined to overlook these imperfections of the flesh in the dazzled contemplation of his mind, his wife Beverley would soon put a stop to any attempt at friendship beyond the call of tutorial duty.
As if to reinforce his thought, Bev’s broad bum, inadequately disguised by an ethnic print frock, now intrudes into the frame of Rodney Wainwright’s abstracted vision. Bent nearly double, and sweating profusely under her floppy sunhat, she is shuffling backwards across the rank lawn, dragging something—what? A hosepipe? A rope? Some animal on a lead? Eventually it proves to be a child’s toy, some brightly coloured wheeled object that wags and oscillates obscenely as it moves along, followed by a gurgling toddler, child of some visiting neighbour. A strong-minded woman, Bev. Rodney Wainwright regards her bottom with respect, but without desire. He imagines Sandra Dix executing the same movement in her blue jeans, and sighs. He forces his eyes back on to the ruled foolscap before him.
“One possible solution,” he writes, and then pauses, gnawing the end of his ballpen.
One possible solution would be to run to the beach, seize Sandra Dix by the hand, drag her behind a sand dune, pull down her bikini pants and
“Cuppa tea, Rod? I’m just going to make one for Meg and me.”
Bev’s red perspiring face peers in at the open window. Rodney stops writing and guiltily covers his pad. After she has gone, he rips out the page, tears it up into small pieces, and tosses it into the wastepaper basket, where it joins several other torn and screwed-up pieces of paper. He starts again on a clean sheet.
The question is, therefore, how can literary criticism…
Morris Zapp, who has nodded off these last few minutes, suddenly wakes again in a flurry of panic, but, examining the illuminated face of his digital watch, is relieved to discover that it is only 5:15. He gets out of bed, scratching himself and shivering slightly (the Swallows, with typical British parsimony, switch off the central heating at night), pulls on a bathrobe and pads softly across the landing to the bathroom. He tugs at the lightcord just inside the door and flinches as blinding fluorescent light pings and ricochets off white and yellow tiles. He micturates, washes his hands, and puts out his tongue at the mirror above the handbasin. It resembles, this tongue, the dried-out bed of a badly polluted river. Too much alcohol and too many cigars last night. And every night.
This is a low point in the day of the globe-trotting academic, when he must wrench himself from sleep, and rise alone in the dark to catch his early plane; staring at his coated tongue in the mirror, rubbing red-rimmed eyes, fingering the stubble on his jowls, he wonders momentarily why he is doing it, whether the game is worth the candle. To shake off these depressing thoughts, Morris Zapp decides to take a quick shower, and too bad if the whining and shuddering of the water pipes wakes his hosts. He whines and shudders himself in some degree, since the water is barely tepid, but the effect of the shower is invigorating. His world-wide traveller’s razor, designed to operate on all known electric currents, and if need be on its own batteries, hums, and Morris Zapp’s brain begins to hum too. He glances at his watch again: 5:30. The taxi has been ordered for six, time enough for him to fix himself a cup of coffee in the kitchen downstairs. He will breakfast at Heathrow while he waits for his connection to Milan.
…
Three thousand miles to the west, at Helicon, New Hampshire, a writers’ colony hidden deep in a pine forest, Morris Zapp’s ex-wife, DÉSIRÉE, tosses restlessly in bed. It is 12:30, and she has been awake since retiring an hour earlier. This is, she knows, because she is anxious about the previous day’s work. A thousand words she managed to write in one of the little cabins in the woods to which, each morning, the resident writers repair with their lunch pails and thermos flasks, to lock themselves away with their respective muses; and she came back to the main house in the late afternoon exhilarated by this exceptional achievement. But as she chatted with the other writers and artists in the course of the evening, over dinner, in front of the TV, across the ping-pong table, tiny doubts began to assail her about those thousand words. Were they the right, the only possible words? She resisted the urge to rush upstairs to her room to read them through again. The routine at Helicon is strict, almost monastic: the days are for silent, solitary wrestling with the creative act; the evenings for sociability, conversation, relaxation. DÉSIRÉE promised herself she would not look at her manuscript before she went to bed, but let it lie till morning, let the first minutes of the next day be reserved for the purpose—the longer she left it the more likely she was to forget what she had written, the more likely therefore that she would be able to read herself with something like an objective eye, to feel, without anticipating it, the shock of recognition she hoped to evoke in her readers.
She went to bed at 11:30, with her eyes consciously averted from the orange folder, lying on top of the pine chest, which contained the precious thousand words. But it seemed to glow in the dark—even now, with her eyes closed, she can feel its presence, like a pulsing source of radioactivity. It is part of a book that DÉSIRÉE has been trying to write for the past four years, a book combining fiction and nonfiction—fantasy, criticism, confession and speculation; a book entitled, simply, Men. Each section has at its head a well-known proverb or aphorism about women in which the key-word has been replaced by “man” or “men.” She has already written, “Frailty Thy Name Is Man,” “No Fury Like A Man Scorned” and “Wicked Men Bother One. Good Men Bore One. That Is The Only Difference Between Them.” Presently she is working on the inversion of Freud’s celebrated cry of bafflement: “What Does A Man Want?” The answer, according to DÉSIRÉE is, “Everything—and then some.”
DéSIRéE turns on to her stomach and kicks impatiently at the skirt of her nightdress, which has gotten entangled round her legs with all her twisting and turning. She wonders whether to try and relax with the help of her vibrator, but it is an instrument she uses, as a nun her discipline, more out of principle than real enthusiasm, and besides, the battery is nearly flat, it might run out of juice before she reached her climax, just like a man—hey, that’s quite good! She switches on the lamp on the night-table and scrawls in the little notebook she keeps always within reach: “Vibrator with flat battery just like a man.” Out of the corner of her eye she can see the orange folder burning into the varnished wood of the chest. She turns out the light, but now she is wide awake, it is hopeless, there is nothing to be done but to take a sleeping pill, though it will make her sluggish for the first couple of hours in the morning. She turns on the night-table lamp again. Now where are the pills? Oh yes, on the chest, next to the manuscript. Perhaps if she allows herself one tiny peep, just one sentence to go to sleep on…
Standin
g at the chest in her bare feet, with a sleeping tablet in one hand, arrested halfway to her mouth, DÉSIRÉE opens the folder and begins to read. Before she knows it, she has come to the end of the three typed pages, swallowed them in three greedy gulps. She can hardly believe that the words which it cost her so many hours and so much effort to find and weld together could be consumed so quickly; or that they could seem so vague, so tentative, so uncertain of themselves. It will all have to be rewritten tomorrow. She swallows a pill, then a second, wanting only oblivion now. Waiting for the pills to do their work, she stands at the window and looks out at the tree-covered hills which surround the writers’ colony, a monotonous, monochrome landscape in the cold light of the moon. Trees as far as the eye can see. Enough trees to make a million and a half paperback copies of Men. Two million. “Grow, trees, grow!” DÉSIRÉE whispers. She refuses to admit the possibility of defeat. She returns to the bed and lies stiffly on her back, her eyes closed, her arms at her side, waiting for sleep.
…
Morris Zapp returns to the guest bedroom, dresses himself comfortably for travelling—corduroy pants, white cotton polo-neck, sports jacket—closes and locks the suitcase he had packed the night before, checks the closet and drawers for any stray belongings, pats various pockets to confirm the presence of his life-support system: billfold, passport, tickets, pens, spectacles, cigars. He tiptoes, as far as it is possible for a man carrying a heavy suitcase to tiptoe, across the landing, and carefully descends the stairs, each tread of which creaks under his weight. He puts the case down beside the front door and glances at his watch again. 5:45.
…
Far out above the cold North Atlantic ocean, aboard TWA Flight 072 from Chicago to London, time suddenly jumps from 2:45 to 3:45, as the Lockheed Tristar slips through the invisible interface between two time-zones. Few of the three hundred and twenty-three souls aboard are aware of the change. Most of them still have their watches adjusted to Chicago local time, where it is 11:45 p.m. on the previous day, and anyway most of them are asleep or trying to sleep. Aperitifs and dinner have been served, the movie has been shown, duty-free liquor and cigarettes dispensed to those desirous of purchasing them. The cabin crew, weary from the performance of these tasks, are clustered round the galleys, quietly gossiping as they check their stocks and takings. The refrigerated cabinets, the microwave ovens and electric urns, which were full when the aircraft took off from O’Hare airport, are now empty. Most of the food and drink they contained is now in the passengers’ bellies, and before they land at Heathrow much of it will be in the septic tanks in the aircraft’s belly.
The main lights in the passenger section, doused for the showing of the film, have not been switched on again. The passengers, replete, and in many cases sozzled, sleep uneasily. They slump and twist in their seats, trying vainly to arrange their bodies in a horizontal position, their heads loll on their shoulders as if they have been garrotted, their mouths gape in foolish smiles or ugly sneers. A few passengers, unable to sleep, are listening to recorded music on stereophonic headphones, or even reading, in the narrow beams of the tiny spotlights artfully angled in the cabin ceiling for that purpose; reading books about sex and adventure by Jacqueline Susann and Harold Robbins and Jack Higgins, thick paperbacks with gaudy covers bought from the bookstalls at O’Hare. Only one reader has a hardback book on her lap, and actually seems to be making notes as she reads. She sits erect, alert, in a window seat in row 16 in the Ambassador class. Her face is in shadow, but looks handsome, aristocratic, in profile, like a face on an old medallion, with a high, noble brow, a haughty Roman nose, and a determined mouth and chin. In the pool of light shed onto her lap, an exquisitely manicured hand guides a slender gold-plated propelling pencil across the lines of print, occasionally pausing to underline a sentence or make a marginal note. The long, spear-shaped fingernails on the hand are lacquered with terracotta varnish. The hand itself, long and white and slender, looks almost weighed down with three antique rings in which are set ruby, sapphire and emerald stones. At the wrist there is a chunky gold bracelet and the hint of a cream silk shirt-cuff nestling inside the sleeve of a brown velvet jacket. The reader’s legs are clothed in generously cut knickerbockers of the same soft material, terminating just below the knee. Her calves are sheathed in cream-coloured textured hose and her feet in kidskin slippers which have replaced, for the duration of the flight, a pair of high-heeled fashion boots made of cream leather, engraved, under the instep, with the name of an exclusive Milanese maker of custom footwear. The lacquered nails flash in the beam of the reading lamp as a page is crisply turned, flattened and smoothed, and the slender gold pencil continues its steady traversing of the page. The heading at the top of the page is “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses” and the title on the spine is Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, an English translation of a book by the French political philosopher, Louis Althusser. The marginal notes are in Italian. Fulvia Morgana, Professor of Cultural Studies at the University of Padua, is at work. She cannot sleep in airplanes, and does not believe in wasting time.
…
In the same airplane, some forty metres to the rear of Fulvia Morgana, Howard Ringbaum is trying to persuade his wife Thelma to have sexual intercourse with him, there and then, in the back row of the economy section. The circumstances are ideal, he points out in an urgent whisper: the lights are dim, everybody within sight is asleep, and there is an empty seat on either side of them. By pushing back the arm-rests dividing these four places they could create enough room to stretch out horizontally and screw.
“Ssh, someone will hear you,” says Thelma, who does not realize that her spouse is perfectly serious.
Howard presses the call-button for cabin service, and when a stewardess appears, requests two blankets and two pillows. Nobody, he assures Thelma, will know what they are doing under the blankets.
“All I’m going to do under mine is sleep,” Thelma says. “As soon as I’ve finished this chapter.” She is reading a novel entitled Could Try Harder, by a British author, Ronald Frobisher. She yawns and turns a page. The book is rather dull. She bought it years ago on their last visit to England, took it home to Canada unopened, packed it again when they moved back to the States; then, looking yesterday for something to read on the plane, plucked it down from a high shelf and blew the dust off it, thinking this would be a good way to re-attune herself to English speech and manners. But the novel is set in the Industrial Midlands, and the dialogue is thick with a dialect that they are unlikely to encounter in the vicinity of Bloomsbury. Howard has a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, to work at the British Museum for six months. They have arranged to rent a small apartment over a shop just off Russell Square. Thelma is going to enrol in a lot of those wonderfully cheap adult education classes they have in England on everything from foreign languages to flower arranging, and really do all the museums and galleries in the capital.
The stewardess brings blankets and pillows in polythene bags. Howard spreads the blankets over their knees and puts his hand up Thelma’s skirt. She pushes it away.
“Howard! Stop it! What’s gotten into you anyway?” Though flustered, she is not altogether displeased by this unwonted display of ardour.
What has gotten into Howard Ringbaum is, in fact, the Mile High club, an exclusive confraternity of men who have achieved sexual congress while airborne. Howard read about this club in a magazine, while waiting his turn in a barbershop about a year ago, and ever since has been consumed with an ambition to belong. A colleague at Southern Illinois, where Howard now teaches English pastoral poetry, to whom Howard confessed this unfulfilled ambition one night, revealed himself to be a member of the club, and offered to put Howard’s name foward if he fulfilled the single condition of membership. Howard asked if wives counted. The colleague said that it wasn’t customary, but he thought the membership committee might stretch a point. Howard asked what proof was required, and the colleague said a semen-stained paper napkin b
earing the logo of a recognized commercial airline and countersigned by the partner in congress. It is a measure of Howard Ringbaum’s humourless determination to succeed in every form of human competition that he succumbed to this crude hoax without a moment’s hesitation. The same characteristic trait, displayed in a party game called Humiliation devised by Philip Swallow many years before, cost Howard Ringbaum dear—cost him his job, in fact, led to his exile to Canada, from which he has only recently been able to return by dint of writing a long succession of boring articles on English pastoral poetry amid the windswept prairies of Alberta—but he has not learned from the experience. “What about the toilet?” he whispers. “We could do it in the toilet.”
“Are you crazy?” Thelma hisses. “There’s hardly room to pee in there, let alone… For heaven’s sake, honey, control yourself. Wait till we get to our little apartment in London.” She smiles at him indulgently.
“Take off your panties and sit on my prick,” says Howard Ringbaum unsmilingly.
Thelma hits Howard in the crotch with her book and he doubles up in pain. “Howard?” she says anxiously. “Are you all right, honey? I didn’t mean to hurt you.”
…
Morris Zapp goes into the Swallows’ kitchen, boils a kettle, and fixes himself a cup of strong, black, instant coffee. Outside the sky is growing lighter, and a few birds are chirping hesitantly in the trees. It is 6 a.m. by the kitchen clock. Morris drains his cup and stations himself in the front hall to forestall the cab-driver’s ring on the doorbell, which might waken the household.
But someone is already awake. There is a creak on the stairs, and Philip comes into view in the order of: leather slippers, bare bony ankles, striped pyjama trousers, mud-coloured dressing-gown, and silver beard.
“Just off, then?” he says, stifling a yawn.