“Oh, I’m with you. Well, we’ll see. I’ll think about it.”
The cab driver picks up Morris’s suitcase and carries it to the car, a courtesy that never ceases to amaze Morris Zapp, coming as he does from a country where cab drivers are locked into their driving seats and snarl at their customers through bars, like caged animals. As the taxi turns the corner, Morris looks back to see Philip waving from the front porch, clutching the flaps of his dressing-gown together with his other hand. Above his head a curtain is drawn back from a bedroom window and a face—Hilary’s?—hovers palely behind the glass.
In Chicago it is midnight; yesterday hesitates for a second before turning into today. A cold wind blows off the lake, sends litter bowling across the pavement like tumbleweed, chills the bums and whores and drug addicts who huddle for shelter beneath the arches of the elevated railway. Inside the city’s newest and most luxurious hotel, however, it is almost tropically warm. The distinctive feature of this building is that everything you would expect to find outside it is inside, and vice versa, except for the weather. The rooms are stacked around a central enclosed space, and their balconies project inwards, into a warm, air-conditioned atmosphere, overlooking a fountain and a lily pond filled with multi-coloured fish. There are palm-trees growing in here, and flowering vines that climb up the walls and cling to the balconies. Outside, transparent elevators like tiny glass bubbles creep up and down the sheer curtain walling of the building, giving the occupants vertigo. It is the architecture of inside-out.
In a penthouse suite from whose exterior windows the bums and whores and drug addicts are quite invisible, and even the biggest automobiles on the Loop look like crawling bugs, a man lies, naked, on his back, at the centre of a large circular bed. His arms and legs are stretched out in the form of an X, so that he resembles a famous drawing by Leonardo, except that his body is thin and scraggy, an old it man’s body, tanned but blotchy, the chest hair grizzled, the legs bony and slightly bowed, the feet calloused and horny. The man’s head, however, is still handsome: long and narrow, with a hooked nose and a inane of white hair. The eyes, if they were open, would be seen to be dark brown, almost black. On the bedside table is a pile of magazines, academic quarterlies, some of which have fallen, or been thrown, to the floor. They have titles like Diacritics, Critical Inquiry, New Literary History, Poetics and Theory of Literature, Metacriticism. They are racked with articles set in close lines of small print, with many footnotes in even smaller print, and long lists of references. They contain no pictures. But who needs pictures when he has a living breathing centrefold all his own?
Kneeling on the bed beside the man, in the space between his left arm and his left leg, is a shapely young Oriental woman, with long, straight, shining black hair falling down over her golden-hued body. Her only garment is a tiny cache-sexe of black silk. She is massaging the man’s scrawny limbs and torso with a lightly perfumed mineral oil, paying particular attention to his long, thin, circumcised penis. It does not respond to this treatment, flopping about in the young woman’s nimble fingers like an uncooked chippolata.
This is Arthur Kingfisher, doyen of the international community of literary theorists, Emeritus Professor of Columbia and Zürich U Universities, the only man in academic history to have occupied two chairs simultaneously in different continents (commuting by jet twice a week to spend Mondays to Wednesdays in Switzerland and ‘Thursdays to Sundays in New York), now retired but still active in the world of scholarship, as attender of conferences, advisory editor to academic journals, consultant to university presses. A man whose life is a concise history of modern criticism: born (as Arthur Klingelfischer) into the intellectual ferment of Vienna at the turn of the century, he studied with Shklovsky in Moscow in the Revolutionary period, and with I. A. Richards in Cambridge in the late twenties, collaborated with Jakobson in Prague in the thirties, and emigrated to the United States in 1939 to become a leading figure in the New Criticism in the forties and fifties, then had his early work translated from the German by the Parisian critics of the sixties, and was hailed as a pioneer of structuralism. A man who has received more honorary degrees than he can remember, and who has at home, at his house on Long Island, a whole room full of the (largely unread) books and offprints sent to him by disciples and admirers in the world of scholarship. And this is Ji-Moon Lee, who came ten years ago from Korea on a Ford Foundation fellowship to sit at Arthur Kingfisher’s feet as a research student, and stayed to become his secretary, companion, amenuensis, masseuse and bedfellow, her life wholly dedicated to protecting the great man against the importunities of the academic world and soothing his despair at no longer being able to achieve an erection or an original thought. Most men of his age would have resigned themselves to at least the first of these impotencies, but Arthur Kingfisher had always led a very active sex life and regarded it as vitally connected, in some deep and mysterious way, with his intellectual creativity.
The telephone beside the bed emits a discreet electronic cheep. Ji-Moon Lee wipes her oily fingers on a tissue and stretches across the prone body of Arthur Kingfisher, her rosy nipples just grazing his grizzled chest, to pick up the receiver. She squats back on her heels, listens, and says into the instrument, “One moment please, I will see if he is available.” Then, holding her hand over the mouthpiece, she says to Arthur Kingfisher: “A call from Berlin—will you take it?”
“Why not? It’s not as though it’s interrupting anything,” says Arthur Kingfisher gloomily. “Who do I know in Berlin?”
The taxi jolts and rumbles through the outer suburbs of Rummidge, throwing Morris Zapp from side to side on the back seat, as the driver negotiates the many twists and turns in the route to the airport. An endless ribbon of nearly identical three-bedroomed semi-detached houses unwinds beside the moving cab. The curtains are still drawn across the windows of most of these houses. Behind them people dream and doze, fart and snore, as dawn creeps over the roofs and chimneys and television aerials. For most of these people, today will be much like yesterday or tomorrow: the same office, the same factory, the same shopping precinct. Their lives are closed and circular, they tread a wheel of habit, their horizons are near and unchanging. To Morris Zapp such lives are unimaginable, he does not even try to imagine them; but their stasis gives zest to his mobility—it creates, as his cab speeds through the maze of streets and crescents and dual carriageways and roundabouts, a kind of psychic friction that warms him in some deep core of himself, makes him feel envied and enviable, a man for whom the curvature of the earth beckons invitingly to ever new experiences just over the horizon.
Back in the master bedroom of the Victorian villa in St John’s Road, Philip and Hilary Swallow are copulating as quietly, and almost as furtively, as if they were stretched out on the rear seats of a jumbo jet.
Returning to bed after seeing off Morris Zapp, Philip, slightly chilled from standing at the front door in his dressing gown and pyjamas, found the warmth of Hilary’s ample body irresistible. He snuggled up to it spoonwise, curving himself around the soft cushion of her buttocks, passing his arm round her waist and cupping one heavy breast in his hand. Unable to sleep, he became sexually excited, lifted Hilary’s nightdress and began to caress her belly and crotch. She seemed moist and compliant, though he was not sure if she was fully awake. He entered her slowly, from behind, holding his breath like a thief, in case she should suddenly come to her senses and push him away (it had happened before).
Hilary is, in fact, fully awake, though her eyes are closed. Philip’s eyes are also shut. He is thinking of Joy, a purple-lit bedroom on a warm Italian night. She is thinking of Morris Zapp, in this same bed, in this same room, curtains drawn against the afternoon sun, ten years ago. The bed creaks rhythmically; the headboard bangs once, twice, against the wall; there is a grunt, a sigh, then silence. Philip falls asleep. Hilary opens her eyes. Neither has seen the other’s face. No word has passed between them.
Meanwhile the telephone conversation between Berlin
and Chicago is coming to its conclusion. A voice whose English is impeccable, and only slightly tinged with a German accent, is speaking.
“So, Arthur, we cannot tempt you to speak at our conference in Heidelberg? I am most disappointed, your thoughts on Rezeptionsästhetik would have been deeply appreciated, I am sure.”
“I’m sorry Siegfried, I just have nothing to say.”
“You are excessively modest, as usual, Arthur.”
“Believe me, it’s not false modesty. I wish it was.”
“But I quite understand. You have many demands upon your time… By the way, what do you think of this new UNESCO chair of literary criticism?”
After a prolonged pause, Arthur Kingfisher says: “News travels fast. It’s not even official yet.”
“But it is true?”
Choosing his words with evident care, Arthur Kingfisher says, “I have reason to think so.”
“I understand you will be one of the chief assessors for the chair, Arthur, is that so?”
“Is this what you really called me about, Siegfried?”
Hearty, mirthless laughter from Berlin. “How could you imagine such a thing, my dear fellow? I assure you that our desire for your presence at Heidelberg is perfectly sincere.”
“I thought you had the chair at Baden-Baden?”
“I do, but we are collaborating with Heidelberg for the conference.”
“And what are you doing in Berlin?”
“The same as you are doing in Chicago, I presume. Attending another conference—what else? ‘Postmodernism and the Ontological Quest.’ Some interesting papers. But our Heidelberg conference will be better organized… Arthur, since you raise the question of the UNESCO chair—”
“I didn’t raise it, Siegfried. You did.”
“It would be hypocritical of me to pretend that I would not be interested.”
“I’m not surprised, Siegfried.”
“We have always been good friends, Arthur, have we not? Ever since I reviewed the fourth volume of your Collected Papers in the New York Review of Books.”
“Yes, Siegfried, it was a nice review. And nice talking to you.”
The hand that replaces the telephone receiver in its cradle in a sleekly functional hotel room on the Kurfurstendamm is sheathed in a black kid glove, in spite of the fact that its owner is sitting up in bed, wearing silk pyjamas and eating a Continental breakfast from a tray. Siegfried von Turpitz has never been known to remove this glove in the presence of another person. No one knows what hideous injury or deformity it conceals, though there have been many speculations: a repulsive birthmark, a suppurating wound, some unheimlich mutation such as talons instead of fingers, or an artificial hand made of stainless steel and plastic—the original, it is alleged by those who favour this theory, having been crushed and mangled in the machinery of the Panzer tank which Siegfried von Turpitz commanded in the later stages of World War II. He allows the black hand to rest for a moment on the telephone receiver, as if to seal the instrument against any leakage of information left in the cable that connected him, a few moments before, to Chicago, while with his ungloved hand he meditatively crumbles a croissant. Then he removes the receiver and with a black leathern index finger dials the operator. Consulting a black leather-bound notebook, he places a long-distance call to Paris. His face is pale and expressionless beneath a skullcap of flat blond hair.
Morris Zapp’s taxi throbs impatiently at red traffic-lights on a broad shopping street, deserted at this hour except for a milk float and a newspaper delivery van. A large billboard advertising British Airways Poundstretcher fares suggests that the airport is not far away. Another, smaller advertisement urging the passer-by to “Have a Fling with Faggots Tonight” is not, Morris knows from his previous sojourn in the region, a manifesto issued by Rummidge Gay Liberation, but an allusion to some local delicacy based on offal. With any luck he himself will be tucking in, tonight, to a steaming dish of tender, fragrant tagliatelli, before passing on to, say, costoletta alla milanese, and perhaps a slice or two of panettone for dessert. Morris’s mouth floods with saliva. The taxi lurches forward. A clock above a jeweller’s shop says that the time is 6.30.
In Paris, as in Berlin, it is 7.30, because of the different arrangements on the Continent for daylight saving. In the high-ceilinged bedroom of an elegant apartment on the Boulevard Huysmans, the telephone rings beside the double bed. Without opening his eyes, hooded like a lizard’s in the brown, leathery face, Michel Tardieu, Professor of Narratology at the Sorbonne, extends a bare arm from beneath his duvet to lift the telephone from its cradle. “Oui?” he murmurs, without opening his eyes.
“Jacques?” inquires a Germanic voice.
“Non. Michel.”
“Michel qui?”
“Michel Tardieu.”
There is a Germanic grunt of annoyance. “Please accept my profound apologies,” says the caller in correct but heavily accented French. “I dialled the wrong number.”
“But don’t I know you?” says Michel Tardieu, yawning. “I seem to recognize your voice.”
“Siegfried von Turpitz. We were on the same panel at Ann Arbor last autumn.”
“Oh yes, I remember. ‘Author-Reader Relations in Narrative.’ “
“I was trying to call a friend called Textel. His name is next to yours in my little book, and both are Paris numbers, so I mixed them up. It was excessively stupid of me. I hope I did not disturb you too much.”
“Not too much,” says Michel, yawning again. “Au revoir.” He turns back to embrace the naked body beside him in the bed, curving himself spoonwise around the soft cushion of the buttocks, brushing with his fingers the suave, silky skin of belly and inner thigh, nuzzling the slender nape beneath the perfumed locks of golden hair. “Cheri,” he whispers soothingly, as the other stirs in his sleep.
In his oak-panelled bedroom at All Saints’ College, Oxford, the Regius Professor of Belles-Lettres sleeps chastely alone. No other person, man or woman, has shared that high, old-fashioned single bed—or, indeed, any other bed—with Rudyard Parkinson. He is a bachelor, a celibate, a virgin. Not that you would guess that from the evidence of his innumerable books, articles and reviews, which are full of knowing and sometimes risqué references to the variations and vagaries of human sexual behaviour. But it is all sex in the head—or on the page. Rudyard Parkinson was never in love, nor wished to be, observing with amused disdain the disastrous effects of that condition on the work-rate of his peers and rivals. When he was thirty-five, already secure and successful in his academic career, he considered the desirability of marrying—coolly, in the abstract, weighing the conveniences and drawbacks of the married state—and decided against it. Occasionally he would respond to the beauty of a young undergraduate to the extent of laying a timid hand on the young man’s shoulder, but no further.
From an early age, reading and writing have entirely occupied Rudyard Parkinson’s waking life, including those parts allocated by normal people to love and sex. Indeed, it could be said that reading is his love and writing his sex. He is in love with literature, with the English poets in particular—Spenser, Milton, Wordsworth, and the rest. Reading their verse is pure, selfless pleasure, a privileged communion with great minds, a rapt enjoyment of truth and beauty. Writing, his own writing, is more like sex: an assertion of will, an exercise of power, a release of tension. If he doesn’t write something at least once a day he becomes irritable and depressed—and it has to be for publication, for to Rudyard Parkinson unpublished writing is like masturbation or coitus interruptus, something shameful and unsatisfying.
The highest form of writing is of course a book of one’s own, something that has to be prepared with tact, subtlety, and cunning, and sustained over many months, like an affair. But one cannot always be writing books, and even while thus engaged there are pauses and lulls when one is merely reading secondary sources, and the need for some release of pent-up ego on to the printed page, however trivial and ephemeral the occasion, bec
omes urgent. Hence Rudyard Parkinson never refuses an invitation to write a book review; and as he is a witty, elegant reviewer, he receives many such invitations. The literary editors of London’s daily and weekly newspapers are constantly on the telephone to him, parcels of books arrive at the porter’s lodge by every post, and he always has at least three assignments going at the same time—one in proof, one in draft and one at the note-taking stage. The book on which he is taking notes at this time lies, spreadeagled, open and face-down, on the bedside cabinet, next to his alarm clock, his spectacles and his dental plate. It is a work of literary theory by Morris Zapp, entitled Beyond Criticism, which Rudyard Parkinson is reviewing for the Times Literary Supplement. His denture seems to menace the volume with a fiendish grin, as though daring it to move while Rudyard Parkinson takes his rest.
The alarm rings. It is 6.45. Rudyard Parkinson stretches out a hand to silence the clock, blinks and yawns. He opens the door of his bedside cabinet and pulls out a heavy ceramic chamber pot emblazoned with the College arms. Sitting on the edge of the bed with his legs apart, he empties his bladder of the vestiges of last night’s sherry, claret and port. There is a bathroom with toilet in his suite of rooms, but Rudyard Parkinson, a South African who came to Oxford at the age of twenty-one and perfected an impersonation of Englishness that is now indistinguishable from authentic specimens, believes in keeping up old traditions. He replaces the chamber pot in its cupboard, and closes the door. Later a college servant, handsomely tipped for the service, will empty it. Rudyard Parkinson gets back into bed, turns on the bedside lamp, puts on his spectacles, inserts his teeth, and begins to read Morris Zapp’s book at the page where he abandoned it last night.
From time to time he underlines a phrase or makes a marginal note. A faint sneer plays over his lips, which are hedged by grey muttonchop whiskers. It is not going to be a favourable review. Rudyard Parkinson does not care for American scholars on the whole. His own work is sometimes treated by them with less respect than is its due. Or, as in the case of Morris Zapp, not treated at all, but totally ignored (he had of course checked the Index under P for his own name—always the first action to be taken with a new book). Besides, Rudyard Parkinson has written three favourable reviews in succession in the last ten days—for the Sunday Times, the Listener, and the New York Review of Books, and he is feeling a little bored with praise. A touch of venom would not come amiss this time, and what better target than a brash, braggart American Jew, pathetically anxious to demonstrate his familiarity with the latest pretentious critical jargon?
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