by David Lodge
Another pause another blank . . . the Olympus Pearlcorder – wonder why it’s called that? Surely not because it’s to record your pearls of wisdom, too corny to be true, but what else could it mean? I go back to my desk sit down in my swivel chair look at the window filled with blank grey sky how I hate the fucking English climate, imagine what it would be like in Boston now crisp cold clear air brilliant blue sky snow on the ground dazzling in the sunshine, or better still Pasadena, oranges and lemons on the bough in the back garden or rather yard as they call it even if it’s several acres like Daddy Thurlow’s spread at Palm Springs . . . Shall I check my Email? No, the idea was not to do any work, not to do any task which would impose its own structure on the stream of consciousness, if a stream is what it is, more like a sewer in your case Carrie said once . . . Because it’s easy to simulate human thought when it’s task-oriented, directed towards a goal, like winning a chess game or solving a mathematical problem, but how to build the randomness the unpredictability of ordinary non-specialized thought, idle thought, how to build that into the architecture is a real problem for AI, which this exercise might conceivably help to solve . . .
I could go after her now pretend to bump into her or say I just happened to see you from my office window, I thought you looked lonely . . . No, don’t say that, people don’t like to be told they . . . Just saw you passing, then, thought perhaps you might like a cup of coffee, we didn’t really have much chance to talk last night . . . why not? [recording stops]
It’s 11.03. I went out intending to catch her up but she’d disappeared into thin air, I wandered round the campus for half an hour nearly, not a sign of her anywhere, not in the shop not by the lake, the Library isn’t open till this afternoon, she might have gone into one of the halls I suppose to have coffee with one of her students but it doesn’t seem very likely, she probably went back to her house but I didn’t feel like knocking on her door, even supposing I could find out which house it is, to ask her back here for coffee, it was supposed to be a spontaneous or accidental thing, and I was beginning to feel rather silly especially as it started to rain again so I came back here just in time to take a call from Carrie asking me to pick up some milk from a garage on my way to Horseshoes. She said don’t be late for lunch I said what is it, she said roast pork with apple rings, I said will there be crackling, she said of course, I said in that case I certainly won’t be late . . . Carrie does the best crackling I’ve ever tasted, crisp and succulent, I feel the saliva sluicing round my mouth at the very thought of it. And after lunch, she said, Polo and Sock want you to take them out on their mountain bikes. I said I was hoping the kids might amuse themselves this afternoon and you and I might retire for a little nap. ‘No chance’ she said, and put the phone down, but she sounded amused rather than pissed off. Should be OK for tonight then . . . It’s because she said no last night that I want her . . . it’s the only thing that really makes me, when she says no . . . otherwise I don’t think much about fucking her, I mean in advance, but if it comes into my head to suggest it and she says no for some reason then I can’t rest till I’ve had her . . . Sad really, but that’s life. Or men. Or me.
2
MONDAY 17TH FEBRUARY. Well, here I am, settled in, more or less. I’ve been allocated a little house or ‘maisonette’, as it’s called (a twee, fake-French word I’ve always disliked) on the campus, at the end of a terrace of five reserved for long-term visitors or newly appointed members of staff. An open-plan living-room with ‘kitchenette’ downstairs, and a bedroomette and bathroomette upstairs, connected by an open staircase. It’s quite big enough for me, but I miss the spacious rooms and high corniced ceilings of Bloomfield Crescent. It’s designed and furnished in a vaguely Scandinavian style – exposed brick and whitewashed walls, pine modular furniture, synthetic cord carpeting – that makes me think of a Novotel, functional but cheerless. The fact that it’s just been redecorated in my honour somehow makes it seem all the bleaker. I must buy some posters to brighten up the walls. I wish I’d thought of bringing a favourite picture from home – the Vanessa Bell lithograph for instance. Home. I must stop thinking about ‘home’. This is my home for the next sixteen weeks, the spring semester.
‘Semester.’ ‘Campus.’ How Americanized universities have become since I was a student – or perhaps it just seems so to me because I went to a traditional one myself. After all, this place was already in existence when I went up to Oxford. It’s what I believe is called a ‘greenfields’ university – very green in fact, where the Severn valley meets the Cotswolds. The University of Gloucester – though it’s actually closer to Cheltenham. Perhaps the founders thought the name of a cathedral city would lend the institution more dignity. ‘The University of Cheltenham’ wouldn’t carry the same conviction, somehow. Anyway, here it is, like a gigantic concrete raft floating on the green fields of Gloucestershire – or rather two rafts loosely roped together, for most of the buildings are arranged in two clusters separated by landscaped grounds and an artificial lake. A courtesy bus chugs round the service roads all day, dropping and picking up people as in an airport car-park. Jasper Richmond, the Head of English and Dean of Humanities, explained to me that the original plan, conceived in the utopian sixties, envisaged a huge campus like an American state university, accommodating thirty thousand students. They started building at each end of the site, Arts at one end and Sciences at the other, confident that they would soon fill up the intervening acres. But costs rose, the money supply dwindled, and in the nineteen-eighties the Government realized that it would be much cheaper to convert all the polytechnics into universities with a stroke of the pen than to enlarge the existing ones. So Gloucester University is unlikely ever to have many more than its present population of eight thousand students, and the open spaces between the Arts and Science buildings will probably never be filled in. ‘We’re an architectural allegory of the Two Cultures, I’m afraid,’ Jasper Richmond said, with a wry smile, as we looked out over the campus from his tenth-floor office in the Humanities Tower towards the distant Science buildings. It wasn’t the first time, I suspected, that he’d made this observation to visitors. In fact almost everything he says has a faintly used feel to it, like paper that has lost its crispness by being handled too frequently. Perhaps that’s inevitable if you’re a teacher, even a university teacher, having to repeat the same things over and over again.
At which thought I feel a cold qualm of apprehension. I can’t afford to be condescending about university teachers, now that I’m one myself. Jasper Richmond showed me the entry in the Faculty course handbook: ‘M.A. in Creative Writing. Prose Narrative. Tues. & Thurs., 2–4 p.m. Tutor: Helen Reed (Dr. R.P. Marsden is on study leave.)’ Russell Marsden, critic, anthologist, and author in his precocious youth of two Mervyn Peakeish novels, one good, the other not so good, who has run the course since its inception, and has retreated to his rustic cottage in the Dordogne to finish, or possibly (as Jasper Richmond rather cattily speculated) to start, an impatiently awaited third novel. I was not a little dismayed to discover on my arrival that Russell Marsden had already departed to the South of France, as I was hoping to get some tips from him about how to run the course. The only experience I’ve had in this line, the evening class at Morley College for a motley collection of housewives, unemployed and retired people, accepted on a first-come-first-served basis, some of them with no formal qualifications at all, is hardly an adequate preparation for taking over one of the most prestigious creative writing courses in the country. The students, carefully winnowed from a mass of eager applicants, will have razor-sharp minds and know all about things like postmodernism and poststructuralism which were just vague rumours from across the sea when I was at Oxford, a distant rattle of tumbrils over the intellectual cobblestones of Paris, a faint babble of impenetrable jargon rising from thick American quarterlies. When I mentioned my misgivings to Jasper Richmond he said, ‘Oh well, I always think good students educate each other.’ I suppose he meant to be reassuring.<
br />
I asked him how long he had been at Gloucester. He sighed and said, ‘Longer than I like to think about. I was one of the pioneers. When all this (gesturing at the view) was one huge building site. We used to attend Faculty Board meetings in green wellies.’ His tone was wistfully nostalgic.
It seems to get dark earlier here than it does at home (there I go again), though of course that’s just an illusion. It never really gets dark in London. All those millions of streetlamps and illuminated signs and lighted shop windows throw a diffused glow up into the sky, so that it never looks black, more like a pastel yellowy grey. Here the streetlamps planted at intervals along the service roads, and the safety lights studding the pedestrian walkways and staircases, seem rather puny attempts to dissipate the dense darkness of the winter night. Beyond the perimeter fence there are only dark fields and darker clumps of trees, and scattered farmhouses whose lights gleam like distant ships at sea.
It’s eerily quiet, too. At about five o’clock there was a kind of mini rush-hour as the academic staff collected their cars from the multi-storey car-parks (which look incongruous and particularly ugly in this pastoral setting) and drove off to their cottages in Cotswold villages or their townhouses in Cheltenham, and the humbler employees of the University and the students who don’t live on campus boarded buses to return to their homes and digs in the locality; but soon after six a deep rural hush descended on the campus. I can actually distinguish the noise made by individual vehicles as they approach, pass and retreat on the service road outside my front door, unlike the promiscuous unceasing background hum of traffic in London.
God I feel wretched.
Coming here was a terrible mistake, I want to run away, I want to scuttle back home to London – home, yes, that’s my home, not this tatty little box. Do I dare? Why not? I haven’t really started yet. I haven’t met any students, or taken any of the University’s money. They’ll easily find someone else to do the job – there are lots of excellent writers around who would jump at it. Why not just leave, tomorrow morning, early? I see myself creeping out of the house before it’s light, like a thief, loading my things into the car, shutting the boot lid softly, softly, so as not to alert anybody, leaving a note for Jasper Richmond on the table in the living-room with the house keys, ‘Sorry, it was a terrible mistake, all my fault, I should never have applied for the post, please forgive me.’ And then pulling the door shut on this Scandinavian rabbit hutch and driving away along the empty service road, scarves of mist round the throats of the streetlamps, slowing down at the exit barrier to give a wave to the security man yawning in his brightly-lit glazed sentry box. He nods back, suspects nothing, raises the barrier to let me out, like Checkpoint Charlie in a Cold War spy film, and I am free! Down the avenue, on to the main road, on to the M5, the M42, the M40, London, Bloomfield Crescent, home.
Except that 58 Bloomfield Crescent has been rented for the next three months to an American art historian on sabbatical and his wife, who arrive next Friday. Never mind, send them a fax, ‘Sorry, all off, change of plan, house not available after all.’ Could they sue me? There’s no legal contract, but perhaps our correspondence would count as one . . . Oh, what’s the point of pursuing this futile line of speculation when we all know (by ‘we’ I mean my neurotic self and my more rational observing, recording self) we know, don’t we, that this is just a fantasy? And that the real reason I won’t run away tomorrow morning is not because of possible litigation by my American tenants (or for that matter by the University of Gloucester, who could undoubtedly sue me for breach of contract, though I very much doubt if they would bother) but because I haven’t got the courage to do it. Because I couldn’t bear the guilt, the shame, the ignominy, of knowing that everybody I know knew that I had funked it, panicked, run away. Imagine having to ring up Paul and Lucy to tell them, and hearing the disappointment in their voices even as they tried to be supportive of their mad mother. Imagine seeing the ill-concealed smirks and smiles of people at literary parties, as they whispered to each other over their glasses of white wine. ‘That’s Helen Reed, did you know she went to be Writer in Residence at Gloucester University and ran away on the first day of the semester because she couldn’t face it?’ And they might add, ‘Not that I blame her, I’m sure I couldn’t face it either,’ but nevertheless they would despise me, and I would despise myself.
It was a nice fantasy while it lasted, though. I even chose the tape I would play in the car on the M5, the Vivaldi wind concerti, with their sprightly, cheerful allegros.
TUESDAY 18TH FEB. I met my students for the first time this afternoon, in a rather bleak seminar room on the eighth floor of the Humanities Tower. We sat on moulded stacking chairs round a large table covered with a faint film of chalk dust. There were notices like road signs fixed to the wall with stylized pictures and diagonal bars across them, prohibiting smoking, eating and drinking. Do students nowadays have to be explicitly forbidden to eat and drink in class? Mine seem reassuringly nice on the whole. Of course it was an edgy sort of occasion, one of mutual appraisal. They had the advantage of already knowing each other well, having been taught for one semester by Russell Marsden. They are an established group, in which each has adopted, or been allotted, a role to play: the extrovert, the sceptic, the clown, the sophisticate, the malcontent, the mother, the naughty child, the enigma, and so on. They had only one person to weigh up this afternoon; I had a cast of twelve to memorize and distinguish between. Most of them are in their twenties, but only a few have come straight from doing a first degree. The majority have been working for a few years, and have given up jobs to take the course, supporting themselves from their savings, or by taking out loans, which makes it seem a dauntingly serious business and does nothing to lessen my anxiety. How, I wonder, can I possibly give them value for their money?
As an ice-breaker I thought I would read something of my own to them. This used to go down well at Morley College in the first class of the session, but I’m not sure it was a good idea on this occasion. I read from The Eye of the Storm. Not from work-in-progress, because I don’t have any. I haven’t been able to write anything except this journal since Martin died. I tried to start a new novel last September, but it just wouldn’t come. I made myself physically sick trying to force it, so I gave up. Inventing fictitious characters and making up things for them to do seems so futile, so artificial, when someone real and near and dear to you has been suddenly, brutally snatched out of existence, like a candle flame pinched between finger and
[A hiatus there while I had a little weep. Bad sign: I thought I had stopped weeping. But I keep rediscovering what a void his death has left in my life, like the shockingly huge gap, as it seems, when you’ve had a tooth extracted and explore the space where it was with your tongue. Or like a phantom limb that, they say, still seems painfully present after it’s been amputated.]
So I read from The Eye of the Storm, the kite-flying chapter. The students listened attentively and chuckled or smiled in the right places and asked intelligent questions afterwards. But I sensed a certain restraint, as if they would have liked to be more critical, but didn’t dare. Perhaps it’s just my paranoia.
WEDNESDAY 19TH FEB. Saw some of the students individually today, in Russell Marsden’s office on the tenth floor of the Humanities Tower. My name has been stencilled on paper and rather crudely stuck over his nameplate on the door. He had cleared some of the bookshelves for me, and emptied the drawers of the steel desk, but locked the filing cabinet, and left his art exhibition posters on the breeze-block walls. Without them it would certainly be a rather drab, depressing little room, but surrounded by these emphatic statements of Dr Marsden’s artistic taste (Mapplethorpe, Francis Bacon, Lucian Freud) I had to struggle against the feeling, never far away, that I am something of an impostor.
Simon Bellamy was the first to knock on my door. I took the opportunity to ask him why the group had seemed somewhat inhibited in the seminar yesterday. Simon is the group extrovert – handsome,
cheerful, curly-haired, articulate. He has been elected (tacitly, almost unconsciously) as the group’s spokesman, and I felt quite safe in putting the question to him. He explained that they hadn’t been quite sure how to respond because Russell Marsden never read his work to them. ‘I suppose,’ he said, with a disarming grin, ‘we thought that if we praised your writing it would look like toadying to the teacher and if we criticized it, it would seem rude.’ He added, ‘Actually I thought it was brilliant,’ and we laughed together at the way he had undermined his own tribute in advance. And yet I believed him. Perhaps we always do believe in praise of ourselves. Even when we know it is not disinterested, we think it is deserved.
Marianne Richmond, Jasper’s wife, phoned me this evening and invited me to dinner on Saturday, ‘with a few friends’, so that’s something to look forward to. I’m dreading the weekend, especially Sunday – never my favourite day of the week. The loneliness. The vacancy.
It’s very quiet here on Maisonette Row. The house adjoining mine is empty. Next along there’s an African gentleman who goes out early in the morning and comes back late in the evening. I have seen him in the Social Sciences Reading Room in the Library, so I presume that’s where he spends his days. Further along there’s an elderly visiting professor of economics from Canada, who is pleasant enough but very deaf. The house furthest from me is occupied by a smiling but tongue-tied Japanese couple whose status and academic affiliation remain obscure. Not a lot of scope for social interaction. I still think longingly about running away, but of course with every day that passes this becomes more unthinkable, the probable consequences more serious, so I hang on, hoping that eventually I will pass the psychological point of no return and be reconciled to my fate. Meanwhile my mind insists on going back over the past and rewriting it: I apply for the job, and am offered it, but having walked around the campus and had a good think, I politely and gratefully decline, and drive back to London, humming along happily with the radio-cassette player, to resume my accustomed life. I take the aborted novel out of its drawer and find that it begins to flow after all. I have the basement of 58 Bloomfield Crescent converted (effortlessly) into a self-contained flat, and some delightful woman of my own age, another widow or divorcée, takes it and becomes a boon companion and devoted friend. I keep catching myself relapsing into this daydream. Sometimes the new tenant is a man, with narrative consequences too shamingly Mills & Boon to write down, even here. It’s as if I am two people at once – the Helen Reed other people see, who is settling into her new job at Gloucester U, calm, efficient, conscientious; and another mad, deluded, disembodied Helen Reed living a parallel life somewhere else, inside the head of the first one.
