Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  As for Alex, it is hard to know whether she is mad, or bad, or a bit of both; but now that she has gone I can feel a little sorry for her, and hope that somewhere, somehow, her unquiet soul will find some peace.

  20

  7th March. I’ve been down in London for a couple of days, and slept for the last time in that soft, narrow, lumpy bed in the back bedroom, glancing up, before turning out the light, at the Charlton Athletic shield above the picture rail, which the next owner of the house will certainly paint over. I can’t put it on the market until I’ve got probate, which will take some time in the absence of a will, but I’ve cleared it out ready for that process. I drove down here, so that I could bring back a few mementoes: a couple of Dad’s nicer, undamaged ceramic pots, and the best of his paintings for Anne and Richard to choose from. I put his old clothes into bin bags for the refuse collection, and gave the good stuff to the Salvation Army. I called a firm in the Yellow Pages that does house clearances, and the proprietor, a well-dressed man with a handlebar moustache that seemed to quiver like a diviner’s rod in anticipation of rich pickings, presented himself at the front door within the hour. If my educated voice had misled him into imagining a house full of fine antique furniture, he was quickly disillusioned. He strode from room to room tutting and sighing, and announced at the end that there was nothing of any value except the cherry-wood gate-leg table in the dining room, worth about £120. In exchange for that, and an additional £300, he offered to take away the entire contents of the house and dispose of them as rubbish. I accepted the offer without demur, and his men came with a van the next day. The house looked incredibly bare and bleak after they had gone, and when I took a last look round before I left it, my footsteps making a hollow sound on the bare, dusty floorboards, I felt a wave of sadness flood through me, at the fragility of our grip on life, the ease with which the marks we leave on the surface of the earth are erased. Tony Harrison said it all, in a few lines:

  The ambulance, the hearse, the auctioneers

  clear all the life of that loved house away.

  The hard-earned treasures of some 50 years

  sized up as junk, and shifted in a day.

  Our house was not loved by me since childhood, and not I think loved by Mum, who hankered after something more modern and commodious, in a better area, but deferred to Dad’s hatred of change and expenditure. He loved it though, I really think he loved it, hard as it is to believe anyone could love a jerry-built inter-war semi. I had an estate agent come round to value it, and he estimated, incredibly, £250,000. I found the cash Dad had hidden away under loose floorboards in two places, his bedroom and the cupboard under the stairs: fat brown envelopes containing about £500, all in old banknotes, probably payments for gigs which he didn’t declare on his tax return. I doubt if they are legal tender any more, and will have to take them to the bank, getting some curious looks from the cashier no doubt. It pains me to think of the value they have lost lying there through decades of inflation, perhaps nine-tenths of what they were worth when he earned them. The money in his estate will, of course, come in useful, as money always does, and I shall give some to Anne and Richard, but my main emotion is regret that he left so much behind, and had so little pleasure out of it while he was alive. It was, I’m sure, the result of his impoverished childhood, growing up in a milieu where nobody had savings, and when the state offered no safety net for the unemployed and the unfortunate: he had seen the consequences of poverty and he was conditioned all his life by the fear of it.

  I brought his ashes down to London with me, and took them to Brickley cemetery yesterday. I had collected them by arrangement from the undertaker’s in a plain metal canister (when I asked on the phone how big it was, the woman who took my call said, ‘Think of a sweetie jar,’ and I feared it might be transparent). I handed over this container at the crematorium, and was joined shortly afterwards by a man in a dark suit who had transferred the ashes to a ‘scatterer’, i.e. a small urn, metallic gold in colour, with a trigger on the top which releases the ashes from the bottom. It was almost the anniversary of Mum’s funeral, another cool March day, but calmer and sunnier, and the cemetery looked much more tidy and less depressing than I remembered. The ugly council flats that used to frown down on it have been demolished and replaced by an estate of small town houses, though the electric trains still rattle past in the cutting on the other side. My escort led me to a lawn surrounded by trees and rose bushes - ‘very nice here in the summer, when the roses are in bloom,’ he remarked - and suggested that I scatter the ashes in the pattern of a cross. I could see faint traces of one or two other crosses on the lawn where ashes had sunk into the earth between the blades of grass, but not yet disappeared. I made a cross on the lawn with two sweeps of the scatterer.The ashes were surprisingly light in colour, almost white, and more like grit than ash in consistency. I wondered if the ash of cremated human bodies is naturally like this, or whether they put something in the ovens to produce these clean, sterile, free-flowing granules. Did the ash-heap beside the crematorium at Auschwitz in which Chaim Hermann’s letter to his wife was found look like this? Somehow I doubted it.

  The events of the last couple of months keep provoking echoes and cross-references like that: the votive candle flickering in the dark on the rubble of the Auschwitz crematorium and the night-light I put on Maisie’s bedside table when she fell asleep for ever; hospital pyjamas and striped prison uniforms; the sight of Dad’s wasted naked body on the hospital mattress when I helped to wash him, and grainy photographs of naked corpses heaped in the death camps. It’s been something of an education, the experience of these last few weeks. ‘Deafness is comic, blindness is tragic,’ I wrote earlier in this journal, and I have played variations on the phonetic near-equivalence of ‘deaf ’ and ‘death’, but now it seems more meaningful to say that deafness is comic and death is tragic, because final, inevitable, and inscrutable. As Wittgenstein said, ‘Death is not an event of life.’ You cannot experience it, you can only behold it happening to others, with various degrees of pity and fear, knowing that one day it will happen to you.

  The sure extinction that we travel to

  And shall be lost in always. Not to be here,

  Not to be anywhere,

  And soon; nothing more terrible, nothing more true.

  Philip Larkin, the deaf bard of timor mortis.

  I keep thinking of that header on the registry office computer screen, ‘DEATH MENU’, and wondering whimsically whether if such a thing were offered, like the carte in a restaurant, by the Angel of Death, what one would choose. Something painless, obviously, but not so sudden that you would not have time to take it in, to say goodbye to life, to hold it in your hand, as it were and let it go; but on the other hand not so long-drawn-out as to be tedious or terrifying. Something painless, dignified (no bedpans and catheters), fully conscious, all faculties intact, not too quick, not too slow, at home not in hospital, so not a heart attack, not a stroke, not cancer, not an air crash or a car crash - oh, what’s the point, nothing will do, the fact is we don’t want to order death at all, in any shape or form, unless we are suicidal. (Suicide bombers order for everybody.) You could say that birth itself is a sentence of death - I expect some glib philosopher has said it somewhere - but it is a perverse and useless thought. Better to dwell on life, and try to value the passing time.

  8th March. Back to the lip-reading class today, after a long interval. I had written to Beth to explain the reason for my absence and the group welcomed me back with sympathetic smiles as I took my place in the semicircle of stacking chairs. There’s a lot of mutual kindness and compassion here on Deaf Row.We began with a puzzle, a picture of a young girl’s face, and three utterances: ‘Philip plays football.’ ‘Barbara likes to watch football.’ ‘Sharon hates football.’ If the pictured girl was going to say one of these sentences which would it be and who was she? I couldn’t make sense of it, but the others seemed to find it easy, perhaps because they had played the game befo
re. The correct answer was Sharon, about to say, ‘Barbara likes to watch football’, because she was forming her lips to make a ‘b’ sound. Then we had a session on gardens. Garden gnomes were originally images of earth spirits, introduced into Britain from Germany in the 1840s by an eccentric baronet, and were not mass-produced here until the 1920s. The lawnmower was invented by Edward Budding, a weaver from Gloucestershire, who got the idea from watching the blades of the cloth-cutting machines in the local textile factory that had put him out of a job. There is an English vicar who has mowed his 200-foot garden in the shape of the British Isles.

  We had a session on homophenes which could cause misunderstanding, for example, married and buried, wet suit and wedding suit, big kiss and biscuits. Much laughter. Members volunteered their own stories of misunderstandings. Marjorie was asked at the supermarket checkout if she would like a ‘free gateau’ and eagerly accepted the offer, which turned out to be a free catalogue. Violet was baffled when her friend enthused about ‘laxative porridge’, which turned out to be ‘wax-free polish’. I told my story of the ‘long-stick saucepan’. We had a short talk on towers. Apparently the leaning tower of Pisa began to lean when they reached the third storey, and the succeeding storeys were made progressively smaller in diameter to compensate. The Eiffel Tower was built as a temporary structure for the 1889 Paris Exhibition, and was much criticised at the time. It was supposed to be demolished afterwards, but the populace became fond of it and it was saved when a wireless transmitter was put on the top. I always learn something new at the lip-reading class.

  ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

  The narrator’s deafness and his Dad have their sources in my own experience, but the other characters in this novel are fictional creations, as is the nameless northern city where most of the story is set, and its university.The only source for Alex Loom’s PhD topic, apart from my own imagination, is an article by Charles E. Osgood, ‘Some Effects of Motivation on Style of Encoding . . . based on research using samples of suicide and pseudicide notes’, in Thomas Sebeok ed., Style in Language (1960). I read that book more than forty years ago in preparation for writing my first work of academic criticism, Language of Fiction (1966), where it is mentioned in a footnote. I did not cite Osgood’s article, which was irrelevant to my subject, but it must have struck me as an idea capable of fictional development because it stayed half-buried in my memory, and with this novel its time had come. When I was about halfway through writing Deaf Sentence I heard by chance of a doctoral dissertation in progress applying linguistic analysis to suicide notes, and learned that other linguists are currently engaged in research and publication on the same subject.To avoid any confusion between my fiction and fact I deliberately avoided acquainting myself with any of this work or its authors. The character of Alex and her observations regarding suicide notes are entirely invented.

  The brief quotations from suicide notes in chapter 7 are, however, taken from a documentary source, Udo Grashoff’s anthology Let Me Finis (Headline Review, 2006). Other publications I have found useful in writing this novel include the following: J.L. Austin, How To Do Things With Words (2 nd edition, 1962); John Carey, ed. The Faber Book of Science (for the passage by Bruce Frederick Cummings quoted in chapter 19); Jean Francois Chabrun, Goya (1965); Malcolm Coulthard, Introduction to Discourse Analysis (1977); Peter French, ‘Mr Akbar’s nearest ear versus the Lombard Reflex’ in Forensic Linguistics (vol. 5, no. 1, 1998); Brian Grant, ed., The Quiet Ear: Deafness in Literature, an anthology (1987); Peter Grundy, Doing Pragmatics (2000); Neil Mercer, Words & Minds (2000); Laurence Rees, Auschwitz: the Nazis and the ‘Final Solution’ (2005); Peter Roach, English Phonetics and Phonology (3rd edn. 2000); Thayer’s Life of Beethoven, edited and revised by Elliot Forbes, (1964); Michael Stubbs, Discourse Analysis (1983) and Text and Corpus Analysis (1966); Antonina Vallentin, This I saw: the Life and Times of Goya (1951).

  I am very grateful to Charles Owen and Vijay Raichura for information and advice concerning linguistic and medical aspects of the novel respectively, and to several others for their notes and comments on various drafts: Bernard Bergonzi, Tony Lacey, Julia Lodge, Alison Lurie, Geoff Mulligan, Jonny Pegg,Tom Rosenthal, Mike Shaw, Paul Slovak and, as always, my wife Mary. And thanks to my grand-daughter Fiona for a pun on Marks & Spencer.

  D.L.

  September, 2007