How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

  Contents

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by David Lodge

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Epigraph

  1: How It Was

  2: How They Lost Their Virginities

  3: How Things Began to Change

  4: How They Lost the Fear of Hell

  5: How They Broke Out Away Down Up Through Etc.

  6: How They Dealt with Love and Death

  7: How It Is

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Polly, Dennis, Angela, Adrian and the rest are bound to lose their spiritual innocence as well as their virginities on the journey between university in the 1950s and the marriages, families, careers and deaths that follow. On the one hand there’s Sex and then the Pill, on the other there is the traditional Catholic Church. In this razor-sharp novel David Lodge exposes the pressures that assailed Catholics everywhere within a more permissive society, and voices their eternal question: how far can you go?

  About the Author

  David Lodge’s novels include Changing Places, Small World, Nice Work, Thinks…, Author, Author, Deaf Sentence and, most recently, A Man of Parts. He has also written stage plays and screenplays, and several books of literary criticism, including The Art of Fiction, Consciousness and the Novel and The Year of Henry James.

  ALSO BY DAVID LODGE

  Fiction

  The Picturegoers

  Ginger, You’re Barmy

  The British Museum is Falling Down

  Out of the Shelter

  Changing Places

  Small World

  Nice Work

  Paradise News

  Therapy

  Home Truths

  Thinks…

  Author, Author

  Deaf Sentence

  A Man of Parts

  Criticism

  Language of Fiction

  The Novelist at the Crossroads

  The Modes of Modern Writing

  Working with Structuralism

  After Bakhtin

  Essays

  Write On

  The Art of Fiction

  The Practice of Writing

  Consciousness and the Novel

  The Year of Henry James

  Drama

  The Writing Game

  Home Truths

  To Ian Gregor

  What can we know? Why is there anything at all? Why not nothing?

  What ought we to do? Why do what we do? Why and to whom are we finally responsible?

  What may we hope? Why are we here? What is it all about?

  What will give us courage for life and what courage for death?

  Hans Küng, On being a Christian

  1

  * * *

  How It Was

  IT IS JUST after eight o’clock in the morning of a dark February day, in this year of grace nineteen hundred and fifty-two. An atmospheric depression has combined with the coal smoke from a million chimneys to cast a pall over London. A cold drizzle is falling on the narrow, nondescript streets north of Soho, south of the Euston Road. Inside the church of Our Lady and St Jude, a greystone, neo-gothic edifice squeezed between a bank and a furniture warehouse, it might still be night. The winter daybreak is too feeble to penetrate the stained-glass windows, doubly and trebly stained by soot and bird droppings, that depict scenes from the life of Our Lady, with St Jude, patron of lost causes, prominent in the foreground of her Coronation in Heaven. In alcoves along the side walls votive candles fitfully illuminate the plaster figures of saints paralysed in attitudes of prayer or exhortation. There are electric lights in here, dangling from the dark roof on immensely long leads, like lamps lowered down a well or pit-shaft; but, for economy’s sake, only a few have been switched on, above the altar and over the front central pews where the sparse congregation is gathered. As they murmur their responses (it is a dialogue mass, a recent innovation designed to increase lay participation in the liturgy) their breath condenses on the chill, damp air, as though their prayers were made fleetingly visible before being sucked up into the inscrutable gloom of the raftered vault.

  The priest on the altar turns, with a swish of his red vestments (it is a martyr’s feast day, St Valentine’s) to face the congregation.

  “Dominus vobiscum.”

  There are eight young people present, including one on the altar performing the office of acolyte. They reply, “Et cum spiritu tuo.”

  A creak of hinges and a booming thud at the back of the church indicates the arrival of a latecomer. As the priest turns back to the altar to read the Offertory prayer, and the rest flutter the pages of their missals to find the English translation in its proper place, all hear the hurried tiptap of high-heeled shoes on the tiled surface of the central aisle. A buxom, jolly-looking girl with a damp head-scarf tied over dark curls makes a hasty genuflection and slides into a pew next to another girl whose blonde head is becomingly draped with a black lace mantilla. The wearer of the mantilla turns her head to give a discreet smile of welcome, incidentally presenting her profile to the thickset youth in the dufflecoat just behind her, who seems to admire it. The dark latecomer wrinkles her nose and arches her eyebrows in comical self-reproach. Now there are nine, plus the priest, and a couple of immobile old ladies who are neither sitting nor kneeling, but wedged into their pew in a position halfway between the two postures, wrapped up like awkward parcels in coats and woollies, and looking as though they were left behind by their families after the last Sunday mass and have been there ever since. We are not, however, concerned with the old ladies, whose time on this earth is almost up, but with the young people, whose adult lives are just beginning.

  It is apparent from their long striped scarves and their bags and briefcases stuffed with books that they are students at one of the constituent colleges of the University of London, situated not far away. Every Thursday in term, Father Austin Brierley, the young curate of Our Lady and St Jude’s, and a kind of unofficial chaplain to the College Catholic Society (for the official chaplain and chaplaincy, embracing the entire University, have appropriately dignified headquarters elsewhere) says mass at 8 a.m. especially for members of his New Testament Study Group, and for any other Catholic students who wish to attend. They do so at considerable cost in personal discomfort. Rising an hour earlier than usual, in cold bed-sitters far out in the suburbs, they travel fasting on crowded buses and trains, dry-mouthed, weak with hunger, and nauseated by cigarette smoke, to be present at this unexciting ritual in a cold, gloomy church at the grey, indifferent heart of London.

  Why?

  It is not out of a sense of duty, for Catholics are bound to hear mass only on Sundays and holydays of obligation (of which St Valentine’s is not one). Attendance at mass on ordinary weekdays is supererogatory (a useful word in theology, meaning more than is necessary for salvation). So, why? Is it hunger and thirst after righteousness? Is it devotion to the Real Presence of Christ in the Blessed Sacrament? Is it habit, or superstition, or the desire for comradeship? Or all these things, or none of them? Why have they come here, and what do they expect to get out of it?

  To begin with the simplest case: Dennis, the burly youth in the dufflecoat, its hood thrown back to expose a neck pitted with boil scars, is here because Angela, the fair beauty in the mantilla, is here. And Angela is here because she is a good Catholic girl, the pride of the Merseyside convent where she was Head Girl and the first pupil ever to win a State Scholarship to University, the eldest daughter of awed parents who run a corner-shop open till all hours and scarcely know what a university is for. Naturally Angela joined the Catholic Society in the first week of her first term and naturally she joined its New Testamen
t Study Group when invited to do so, and naturally she goes along to the Thursday morning masses, for she has been conditioned to do what is good without questioning and it scarcely costs her any effort. Not so with Dennis. He is a Catholic, but not a particularly devout one. His mother, who has shouted herself hoarse from the foot of the stairs, at home in Hastings, on many a Sunday morning to get him up in time for church, would be stunned to see him here of his own volition at an early midweek mass. Dennis is fairly stunned himself, yawning and shivering inside his dufflecoat, yearning for his breakfast and the first fag of the day. This is not his idea of fun, but he has no choice, he cannot bear to let Angela out of his sight a moment longer than is absolutely unavoidable, escorting her up to the very threshold of her lecture rooms in the French Department before hurrying off to his own instruction in Chemistry. As soon as he set eyes on her at the Christmas Hop he knew he must make her his own, she was his dream made flesh in a pink angora jumper and black taffeta skirt. That he was a Catholic gave him an immediate advantage, for Angela trusted him not to be like the other boys she had met at hops who, she complained, held you too close on the dance floor and offered to see you home only in order to be rude. But his faith is a double-edged asset to Dennis, who must act up to the part, not only desisting from rudeness in word and deed, but joining Cath.Soc, and attending its boring study groups and getting up for this early weekday mass in the perishing winter dark for fear that if he does not some other eligible Catholic youth will carry Angela off. Dennis suspects (quite correctly) that Adrian, for instance – the bespectacled youth in the belted gaberdine raincoat, expertly manipulating his thick Roman missal with its four silk markers in liturgical colours, red, green, purple and white – is interested in Angela, and that very probably Michael is too – the boy with the dark slab of greasy hair falling forward across a white snub-nosed face, kneeling some rows behind the others, wearing an extraordinarily shapeless, handed-down tweed overcoat that reaches almost to his ankles when he stands up for the Gospel – but there Dennis is wrong.

  Michael is interested not in any particular girl, but in girls generally. He does not want a relationship, he wants sex – though his lust is vague and hypothetical in the extreme. At the Salesian grammar school on the northern outskirts of London which he attended before coming up to the University, a favourite device of the bolder spirits in the sixth form to enliven Religious Instruction was to tease the old priest who took them for this lesson with casuistical questions of sexual morality, especially the question of How Far You Could Go with the opposite sex. “Please, Father, how far can you go with a girl, Father?” The answer was always the same, though expressed in different ways: your conscience would tell you, no further than you wouldn’t be ashamed to tell your mother, as far as you would let another boy go with your sister. Michael listened to this with lowered eyes and a foolish grin on his face, never having been any distance at all with a real girl. He has not advanced since then. Any reasonably personable female, therefore, will do for his purely mental purposes, as long as she has perceptible breasts. If Angela should happen to take off her coat first in the Lyons cafeteria where they will all have breakfast after mass, he will look at her breasts lasciviously, but if Polly (the latecomer) should be the first he will look at her breasts with equal lasciviousness, though they are of quite a different shape, and the breasts of the women sitting opposite him in the Tube will do just as well, and so will the breasts pictured in the photographic art books displayed in bookshops in the Charing Cross Road – indeed, these will do better because, though not actually present in the flesh, they are uncovered, and thus attest more strikingly to the really amazing, exciting fact of the mere existence of breasts. As for female pudenda, well, Michael isn’t (as we say nowadays) into them yet, he doesn’t even have a verbal concept for that orifice that he can think with comfortably – cunt being a word that he, and the others present at this St Valentine’s mass, have seen only on lavatory walls and wouldn’t dream of pronouncing, even silently, to themselves; and though Michael has seen the word vagina in print, he is not sure how to pronounce it, nor is it a word that seems to do justice to what it signifies. He is not at all sure about that, either, never having seen one that was more than three summers old, but anyway breasts are quite enough to keep him in a fever of excitement at the moment. Breasts, and the underclothing that goes with them, are sufficient to be going on with. There is no shortage of reminders of these things, or at least his mind is finely tuned to pick up their vibrations at the slightest opportunity. Give Michael a newspaper double-page spread to scan, with, say, two thousand words on it, and his eye will zoom in on the word cleavage or bra instantly. American psychologists have since established by experiment that the thoughtstream of the normal healthy male turns to sex every other minute between the ages of sixteen and twenty-six, after which the intervals grow gradually longer (though not all that long), but Michael does not know this; he thinks he is abnormal, that the pollution of his thoughtstream is the work of the Devil, and that he is grievously at fault in not only not resisting temptation, but in positively inviting it. For instance, he walks along the Charing Cross Road at every opportunity, even if it involves a considerable detour; and he reads in the Union Lounge, a frowzy basement room filled with damaged furniture and cigarette smoke, the cheap popular papers that are most likely to include the word cleavage and pictures of girls displaying that feature, or rather gap – that fascinating vide, that absence which signifies the presence of the two glands on either side of it more eloquently than they do themselves (or so the structuralist jargon fashionable in another decade would put it, though to Michael in February 1952 cleavage is just second-best to actual bare tits, which newspapers obviously can’t show, something to keep you going until it is time for another saunter down the Charing Cross Road). He does these things knowing that they will give him impure thoughts. An impure thought, he has been told by a boy who had been told by a priest in confession, is any thought that gives you an erection, and it doesn’t take much to give Michael one of those. It is almost a permanent condition of his waking hours. (Twenty-one years later he learned from a magazine article about the making of pornographic films in Los Angeles that the producers of such films employed special stand-by studs in case the male lead couldn’t manage an erection; you didn’t have to act, all they ever filmed was your penis, all you had to do was to get it up, and into the female lead; and he thought, ruefully, that would have been the job for me when I was young – ruefully, because he was having trouble himself getting it up then, and not even reading such an article in a magazine, with pictures of naked girls with their legs apart, would do the trick. He was passing blood with his bowel movements at that particular time, and was more apt to think of death than sex every other minute.) But in 1952 he has erections, which is to say impure thoughts, very frequently. These, he thinks, are probably only venial sins, but he masturbates quite often too, and that is surely a mortal sin.

  Before we go any further it would probably be a good idea to explain the metaphysic or world-picture these young people had acquired from their Catholic upbringing and education. Up there was Heaven; down there was Hell. The name of the game was Salvation, the object to get to Heaven and avoid Hell. It was like Snakes and Ladders: sin sent you plummeting down towards the Pit; the sacraments, good deeds, acts of self-mortification, enabled you to climb back towards the light. Everything you did or thought was subject to spiritual accounting. It was either good, bad or indifferent. Those who succeeded in the game eliminated the bad and converted as much of the indifferent as possible into the good. For instance, a banal bus journey (indifferent) could be turned to good account by silently reciting the Rosary, unobtrusively fingering the beads in your pocket as you trundled along. To say the Rosary openly and aloud in such a situation was more problematical. If it witnessed to the Faith, even if it excited the derision of non-believers (providing this were borne with patience and forgiveness) it was, of course, Good – indeed heroica
lly virtuous; but if done to impress others, to call attention to your virtue, it was worse than indifferent, it was Bad – spiritual pride, a very slippery snake. Progress towards Heaven was full of such pitfalls. On the whole, a safe rule of thumb was that anything you positively disliked doing was probably Good, and anything you liked doing enormously was probably Bad, or potentially bad – an “occasion of sin”.

  There were two types of sin, venial and mortal. Venial sins were little sins which only slightly retarded your progress across the board. Mortal sins were huge snakes that sent you slithering back to square one, because if you died in a state of mortal sin, you went to Hell. If, however, you confessed your sins and received absolution through the sacrament of Penance, you shot up the ladder of grace to your original position on the board, though carrying a penalty – a certain amount of punishment awaiting you in the next world. For few Catholics expected that they would have reached the heavenly finishing line by the time they died. Only saints would be in that happy position, and to consider yourself a saint was a sure sign that you weren’t one: there was a snake called Presumption that was just as fatal as the one called Despair. (It really was a most ingenious game.) No, the vast majority of Catholics expected to spend a certain amount of time in Purgatory first, working off the punishment accruing to sins, venial and mortal, that they had committed in the course of their lives. They would have been forgiven these sins, you understand, through the sacrament of Penance, but there would still be some detention to do in Purgatory. Purgatory was a kind of penitential transit camp on the way to the gates of Heaven. Most of your deceased relatives were probably there, which was why you prayed for them (there would be no point, after all, in praying for a soul that was in Heaven or Hell). Praying for them was like sending food parcels to refugees, and all the more welcome if you could enclose a few indulgences. An indulgence was a kind of spiritual voucher, obtained by performing some devotional exercise, promising the bearer so much off the punishment due to his sins, e.g. forty days’ remission for saying a certain prayer, or two hundred and forty days for making a certain pilgrimage. “Days” did not refer to time spent in Purgatory (a misconception common in Protestant polemic) for earthly time did not, of course, apply there, but to the canonical penances of the mediaeval Church, when confessed sinners were required to do public penance such as sitting in sackcloth and ashes at the porch of the parish church for a certain period, instead of the purely nominal penances (recitation of prayers) prescribed in modern times. The remission of temporal punishment by indulgences was measured on the ancient scale.