How Far Can You Go?

by David Lodge

3

  * * *

  How Things Began to Change

  MIRIAM WAS QUITE right. For all of them who married in the nineteen-fifties, except poor Violet, the next decade was dominated by babies. Dennis and Angela, Edward and Tessa, Adrian and Dorothy, Michael and Miriam herself, had produced, by the end of 1966, fourteen children between them, in spite of strenuous efforts not to. That is to say, although each of these couples wanted to have children, the latter arrived more quickly and frequently than their parents had wished for or intended. And the reason for this, of course, was that, obedient to their Church’s teaching, they relied upon periodic abstinence as a way of planning their families, a system known as Rhythm or the Safe Method, which was in practice neither rhythmical nor safe. I have written about this before, a novel about a penurious young Catholic couple whose attempts to apply the Safe Method have produced three children in as many years, and whose hopes of avoiding a fourth depend precariously on their plotting a day-by-day graph of the wife’s body-temperature to determine the time of her ovulation, and confining their enjoyment of conjugal love to the few days between this putative event and the anxiously awaited onset of her period. It was intended to be a comic novel and most Catholic readers seemed to find it funny, especially priests, who were perhaps pleased to learn that the sex life they had renounced for a higher good wasn’t so very marvellous after all. Some of these priests have told me that they lent the book to people dying of terminal diseases and how it cheered them up, which is fine by me – I can’t think of a better reason for writing novels – but possibly these readers, too, found it easier to bid farewell to the pleasures of the flesh when they were depicted as so hemmed about with anxiety. Healthy agnostics and atheists among my acquaintance, however, found the novel rather sad. All that self-denial and sacrifice of libido depressed them. I think it would depress me, too, now, if I didn’t know that my principal characters would have made a sensible decision long ago to avail themselves of contraceptives.

  Why this novel should have been translated into Czech and no other foreign language I cannot explain, for I should have thought that Czech Catholics would have more important things to worry about than problems of conscience over birth control, and I cannot imagine that non-Catholic Czechs would take a great interest in the subject. However, it did elicit, from Mr. Cestimir Jerhot of Prague, the nicest request for my autograph I have ever received, or am ever likely to receive. “Dear Sir,” he wrote, “I beg your costly pardon for my extraordinary beg and readings-request, with them I turn at you. I am namely a great reader and books-lover. Among my best friends – books – I have also in my library the Czech copy of your lovely book ‘Den zkazy v Britskem museu’. I have read it several times and ever I have found it an extraordinary smiling book. I thank you very much for the best readings experiences and nice whiles, that has given your lovely work…”

  Thank you again, Mr. Jerhot, for your lovely letter. This book is not a comic novel, exactly, but I have tried to make it smile as much as possible.

  For Dorothy and Adrian, Tessa and Edward, Miriam and Michael, Angela and Dennis, then, in the early sixties, it was babies, babies, all the way. Nappies, bottles, colic, broken nights, smells of faces and ammonia, clothes and furniture stained with dribble and sick. Well, that was all right. They were prepared to put up with all that, especially Tessa, who doted on babies, and Dennis, who was thrilled with paternity. The others, too, all had moments of great joy and pride in their infant offspring. Nor were the economic consequences of their fertility an overwhelming concern, though of course the wives had to give up work almost as soon as they were married, and at a time of increasing general affluence they had to be content with cramped, poorly furnished accommodation relative to their peer-group, and acquired cars, TVs and household appliances long after their non-Catholic friends. All this would have been tolerable if they had been erotically fulfilled. But just when they began to get the hang of sex – to learn the arts of foreplay, to lose their inhibitions about nakedness, to match each other’s orgasmic rhythms – pregnancy or the fear of pregnancy intervened, and their spontaneity was destroyed by the tedious regime of calendar and temperature chart. For they did not always feel amorous on the permitted days, and if they made the mistake of getting amorous outside the permitted days it was back to the old game of How Far Could You Go. Most galling of all, their efforts to control their fertility always failed anyway, sooner or later. There were times when Angela thought it would be preferable simply to trust to luck and Providence, since it seemed to make little difference in the long run, and the frustration of one’s intelligent efforts was almost as bad as the actual consequences – at least it seemed to be so for Dennis, who would pore over their graphs and diaries, trying to pinpoint where they had gone wrong, his scientific self-esteem piqued by failure. More than once they quarrelled over some alleged carelessness or inaccuracy on her part in keeping the record.

  During a pregnancy, after the initial vexation and morning sickness had worn off, and providing there were no gynaecological complications, the couples might enjoy a few months of free and easy sex, but after a new baby was born there would be a long hiatus, for it was not possible to plot the incidence of ovulation with any confidence as long as breast-feeding continued. This circumstance was particularly frustrating for Michael, since Miriam grew the most superb breasts, round and firm as apples, while she was nursing, and he wasn’t even allowed to touch them, they were so tender and full of milk. All he could do was sit and watch enviously as his infant sucked and gently kneaded his wife’s blindingly beautiful tits – which, by the time he and Miriam could make love again, would have disappeared.

  Michael was perhaps the most frustrated of the men at this time, for his erotic imagination, always sensitive to stimulus, was being fed with more and more hints from the outside world, especially fiction. He followed the trial of Lady Chatterley’s Lover with intense interest, and was one of the first to buy a copy of the Penguin edition when it was published, travelling into the next town to ensure that no one from the Catholic College of Education where he was now employed as a lecturer in English Literature would observe him making the purchase. He read the pages staring in disbelief at the forbidden words so boldly printed there and marvelling at the acts described. He had never much cared for Lawrence’s writing, and one half of his mind sneered at the book’s overblown rhetoric and portentous neo-paganism, while the other half felt a deep, envious attraction to the idea of phallic tenderness. When he had finished the novel, he passed it to Miriam, but she stopped reading it halfway through. She thought it was unconvincing and badly written; therefore the sex seemed crude and unnecessarily explicit. Michael could not defend the novel on literary-critical grounds, but he was disappointed, for the knowledge that Miriam was reading it excited him, and he had been hopeful that the passage about Connie Chatterley kissing Mellors’ penis, which was the most amazing thing he had ever read in his whole life, might have given Miriam some ideas, but she did not get that far. After the publication of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, Michael observed, the amount and variety of sexual intercourse in contemporary fiction increased dramatically. Whether this was because Lawrence’s novel had encouraged more people to have it off more often, in more different ways, than before, or because it had merely encouraged novelists to admit what had been going on all the time, Michael was in no position to judge. He just felt that he was missing an awful lot.

  The others did not envy the growing permissiveness of secular society so candidly. Adrian, for instance, imagined that his intense interest and excitement at the Profumo affair in the spring of 1963 was because it illustrated the general rottenness of the British political Establishment, which he was apt to compare unfavourably with the style and idealism of the American administration led by President Kennedy, the first Roman Catholic ever to be elected to that office. Adrian did not admit, even to himself, that he was deeply fascinated by the shameless self-possession of the call-girls, Christine Keeler and
Mandy Rice-Davies, when interviewed about their sex-lives on TV and in the press. They spoke as if there was no such thing as sin in the world. At this time Adrian and Dorothy were abstaining totally and indefinitely from sexual intercourse, since Dorothy’s womb was in bad shape following two babies and a miscarriage in quick succession. (At about the same time, President Kennedy was confiding to his friend Ben Bradlee, later editor of the Washington Post, that if he didn’t have a woman every three days or so, he got a bad headache; and by woman the President didn’t mean Mrs Kennedy. But Adrian only read about that many years later in a newspaper excerpt from Mr. Bradlee’s memoirs.)

  Of the four couples, Edward and Tessa probably suffered least under the regime of the Safe Period, for several reasons. They were comparatively well-off, they wanted a large family anyway, and they managed to space their first three children at two-year intervals without too much difficulty. Tessa was a strong healthy girl, with a wonderfully regular menstrual cycle (her graphs, Edward used to say, were a thing of beauty). Edward’s problems were more in his professional sphere. A GP in the suburbs of an industrial Midlands city, he had an arrangement with his partners by which he looked after the Catholic patients in the practice requiring family planning advice, and he gave up one evening a week to similar service for the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council. Edward attended seminars arranged by the CMAC and kept up conscientiously with the medical literature on the use of the Safe Period. He instructed his clients in the use of the basal temperature method, and spent many hours beyond the call of duty going over the graphs they submitted to him for interpretation. The failure rate was, however, depressingly high. At first he was inclined to attribute this to lack of care and attention on the part of his patients, many of whom were working-class women unskilled in the use of thermometers and graph paper, but after a few years he began to have graver doubts about the reliability of the method itself, and to dread the faintly reproachful look on the faces of those of his family-planning clients who returned unexpectedly to ask for a pregnancy test.

  One night he and Tessa were woken by a frantic banging on the front door. Assuming that he was being summoned to an emergency, Edward grabbed his bag and hurried down the stairs. A stranger with dishevelled clothing and staring eyes exploded into the hall and threw Edward to the ground. “Safe! Safe! Safe!” he screamed, banging Edward’s head on the floor to emphasize the repetition. Recovering from his surprise, Edward wrestled the man into submission, whereupon he went limp and burst into tears. While Tessa quietened the terrified children, who had been woken by the fracas, Edward took the man into the lounge and gave him a mild sedative. It transpired that Edward had advised his wife on birth control, with the usual result, and that evening she had given birth to a child, their sixth, with some kind of physical malformation which the man could not even bring himself to describe. Tessa came into the room in her dressing-gown in time to hear this story, and scolded the man for relieving his feelings on Edward. “I’m very sorry for you and your wife, especially your wife,” she said, “but you really can’t blame it on my husband. These things can happen to anybody, at any time.”

  Edward nodded agreement, but inwardly he was not so sure. There had been four babies born in the practice with non-hereditary congenital abnormalities since he had joined it, and three of them had been born to his family-planning clients. Somewhere in the medical journals he had come across the hypothesis that genetic defects were more likely to occur when the ovum was fertilized towards the end of its brief life-span, and this was obviously more likely to occur with couples who were deliberately restricting their intercourse to the post-ovulatory period. The theory had not been tested by controlled experiment, and his own experience had no statistical significance whatsoever, but still, it was… unsettling. Edward did not mention these disquieting thoughts to Tessa, and was very glad he hadn’t when shortly afterwards she became pregnant for the fourth time, unintentionally. Tessa took it very well, joked about Vatican Roulette and said you couldn’t win them all; but Edward watched her swelling belly with barely disguised feelings of anxiety and dread. He terminated his voluntary work for the Catholic Marriage Advisory Council, and recommended the basal temperature method to Catholic patients in the practice with more caution than previously.

  You may wonder why they all persevered with this frustrating, undignified, ineffective, anxiety-creating system of family planning. They wondered themselves, years later, when they had all given it up. “It was conditioning,” said Adrian, “it was the projection of the celibate clergy’s own repressions on to the laity.” “It was guilt,” said Dorothy, “guilt about sex. Sex was dirty enough without going into birth control, that was the general feeling.” “I think it was innocence,” said Edward. “The idea of natural birth control, without sheaths or pills or anything, was very appealing to people with no sexual experience; it took some time to discover that unfortunately it didn’t work.” “It was fear, the fear of Hell,” said Michael. Well, yes, that was at the bottom of it, they all admitted. (They were gathered together in 1969 for the AGM of a pressure group called Catholics for an Open Church, to which they all belonged, and were chatting together afterwards in a pub.)

  They had been indoctrinated since adolescence with the idea, underlined by several Papal pronouncements, that contraception was a grave sin, and a sin that occupied a unique place in the spiritual game of Snakes and Ladders. For unlike other sins of the flesh, it had to be committed continuously and with premeditation if it was to have any point at all. It was not, therefore, something that could be confessed and absolved again and again in good faith, like losing one’s temper, or getting drunk, or, for that matter, fornicating. (A nice question for casuists: was fornication more or less culpable if committed using contraceptives?) It excluded you from the sacraments, therefore; and according to Catholic teaching of the same vintage, if you failed to make your Easter Duty (confession and communion at least once a year, at Easter or thereabouts) you effectively excommunicated yourself. So, either you struggled on as best you could without reliable contraception, or you got out of the Church; these seemed to be the only logical alternatives. Some people, of course, had left precisely because they could no longer believe in the authority of a Church that taught such mischievous nonsense. More often, those who lapsed over this issue retained a residual belief in the rest of Catholic doctrine and thus lived uncomfortably in a state of suppressed guilt and spiritual deprivation. One way or another, Catholics who used contraceptives were likely to be committing a sin against the Holy Ghost – either Resisting the Known Truth or Obstinacy in Sin – and thus putting themselves at risk of final damnation. So Michael was in that sense right – it all came down to fear of Hell.

  “Where we went wrong, of course,” said Adrian, “was in accepting the theology of mortal sin.”

  “No,” said Miriam, who had been listening quietly to their comments. “Where you went wrong was in supposing that the Church belonged to the Pope or the priests instead of to the People of God.”

  They nodded agreement. “The People of God” was a phrase the Catholics for an Open Church approved of. It made them sound invincible.

  In the early nineteen-sixties, however, their main hope was that the official Church would change its mind on birth control; that they would wake up one morning and read in the papers that the Pope had said it was all right for them to use contraceptives after all. What a rush there would have been to the chemists’ and barbers’ shops, and the Family Planning Clinics! In hindsight it is clear that this was a fairly preposterous expectation, for such a reversal of traditional teaching would have dealt a blow to the credibility of papal authority so shattering that no Pope, not even Pope John, could reasonably have been expected to perpetrate it. Miriam was right: instead of waiting for the Pope to contradict his predecessors, they should have made up their own minds. This in fact they did, in due course, but it took a lot of misery and stress to screw them up to the point of disobedience. In the early ninet
een-sixties they were still hoping for a change of heart at the top, at least in favour of the Pill, to which, some progressive theologians claimed, the traditional natural law arguments against artificial contraception did not apply.

  In other respects the Church undoubtedly was changing. Pope John, against all expectations (CARETAKER PONTIFF ELECTED, Angela and Dennis had read on newspaper placards when they returned from their honeymoon) had electrified the Catholic world by the radical style of his pontificate. “We are going,” he declared, “to shake off the dust that has collected on the throne of St Peter since the time of Constantine and let in some fresh air.” The Second Vatican Council which he convened brought out into the light a thousand unsuspected shoots of innovation and experiment, in theology, liturgy and pastoral practice, that had been buried for decades out of timidity or misplaced loyalty. In 1962, Pope John actually set up a Pontifical Commission to study problems connected with the Family, Population and Birth Control. This was encouraging news in one sense, since it seemed to admit the possibility of change, but disappointing in that it effectively removed the issue from debate at the Vatican Council, which began its deliberations in the same year. Pope John died in 1963, to be succeeded by Pope Paul VI, who enlarged the Commission and instructed its members specifically to examine the Church’s traditional teaching with particular reference to the progesterone pill. Catholics, especially young married ones, waited impatiently for the result of this inquiry.

  Meanwhile, other changes proceeded at a dizzying pace. The mass was revised and translated into the vernacular. The priest now faced the congregation across a plain table-style altar, which made the origins of the Mass in the Last Supper more comprehensible, and allowed many of the laity to see for the first time what the celebrant actually did. All masses were now dialogue masses, the whole congregation joining in the responses. The Eucharistic fast was reduced to a negligible one hour, before which any kind of food and drink might be consumed, and the laity were urged to receive communion at every mass – a practice previously deemed appropriate only to people of great personal holiness and entailing frequent confession. Typical devotions of Counter-Reformation Catholicism such as Benediction and the Stations of the Cross dwindled in popularity. Rosaries gathered dust at the backs of drawers. The liturgy of Holy Week, previously of a length and tedium only to be borne by the most devout, was streamlined, reconstructed, vernacularized, and offensive references to the “perfidious Jews” were removed from the prayers on Good Friday. Ecumenism, the active pursuit of Christian Unity through “dialogue” with other Churches, became a recommended activity. The change of posture from the days when the Catholic Church had seen itself as essentially in competition with other, upstart Christian denominations, and set their total submission to its own authority as the price of unity, was astonishingly swift. Adrian, looking through his combative apologetics textbooks from Catholic Evidence Guild days, before sending them off to a parish jumble sale, could hardly believe how swift it had been. And from the Continent, from Latin America, through the religious press, came rumours of still more startling innovations being mooted – married priests, even women priests, Communion in the hand and under both kinds, intercommunion with other denominations, “Liberation Theology”, and “Catholic Marxism”. A group of young intellectuals of the latter persuasion, based in Cambridge, founded a journal called Slant in which they provocatively identified the Kingdom of God heralded in the New Testament with the Revolution, and characterized the service of Benediction as a capitalist-imperialist liturgical perversion which turned the shared bread of the authentic Eucharist into a reified commodity.