by Lodge, David
Did you get my last letter about not being able to find Let’s Write a Novel? It seems a long time since we heard from you. Have you started teaching yet?
I met Janet Dempsey at the supermarket and she said that Robin was determined to move if he doesn’t get promotion this session. But surely they can’t give him a senior lectureship before you, can they? He’s so much younger.
Write soon, love from
Hilary
PS. The noise from the washing-machine is getting worse.
Philip to Hilary
Darling,
I was stricken with guilt as soon as I saw your second airletter this morning. Mea culpa, but it has been a rather hectic week, with the term, or quarter as they call it, beginning; and I’d hoped that the roses would have been some assurance that I was alive and kicking and thinking of you. Instead of which they seem to have had the opposite effect. I confess I’d put back a fair amount of gin the night before, and perhaps the roses were a morning-after act of atonement. The cocktail party was given by Luke Hogan, the Chairman of the Department, whose wife enlisted my help in coaxing Charles Boon to come and be lionized, an irony I could have done without. Among the other guests was Mrs. Zapp, extremely tight, and in a highly aggressive mood. I didn’t take to her at all, but since then, through an odd coincidence, I’ve had to revise my estimate somewhat in her favour. I followed up an advertisement for a second-hand Chevrolet Corvair, which turned out to be the Zapps’ second car. But when Mrs. Zapp recognized me she told me that the Corvair is considered an unsafe model, and very honestly advised me not to buy it.
The Zapps live in a luxurious house, in some disarray when I called, at the top of an incredibly steep hill. There are two young Zapps, twins, called rather preposterously Elizabeth and Darcy (Zapp is a Jane Austen man, of course—indeed the Jane Austen man in the opinion of many). The gossip here is that their marriage is breaking up, and Mrs. Zapp intimated as much to me, so I suppose that might account for her rather off-putting manner, and his too, by the sound of it. The divorce rate is fantastically high here. It’s rather disturbing when one is used to a more stable social environment. So is the way everybody, including Mrs. Zapp, uses four-letter words all the time, even in front of their own children. It’s a bit of a shock at first, hearing faculty wives and nice young girls saying “shit” and “fuck,” as one might say “Gee whizz,” or “darn it.” Rather like one’s first week in the army.
I confess I had something of the raw-recruit feeling when I went to meet my classes for the first time this week. The system is so different, and the students are so much more heterogeneous than they are at home. They’ve read the most outlandish things and not read the most obvious ones.
I had a student in my room the other day, obviously very bright, who appeared to have read only two authors, Gurdjieff (is that how you spell him?) and somebody called Asimov, and had never even heard of E. M. Forster.
I’m teaching two courses, which means I meet two groups of students three times a week for ninety minutes, or would do if it weren’t for the Third World Students’ strike. There’s a student called Wily (sic) Smith, who claims he’s black, though in fact he looks scarcely darker than me, and he pestered me from the day I arrived to let him enrol in my creative writing course. Well, I finally agreed, and then on the first occasion the class met, what d’you think happened? Wily Smith harangued his fellow students and persuaded them that they must support the strike by boycotting my class. There’s nothing personal in it, of course, as he was kind enough to explain, but it did seem rather a nerve.
Well, darling, I hope the length of this letter will make up for my remissness of late. Please assure Matthew that my house is not about to slide into the sea. As to Robin Dempsey, I think it’s unlikely that he’ll get a senior lectureship this year, promotion prospects being what they are at Rummidge, but not through any competition with me, I’m afraid. He has published quite a lot of articles.
All my love,
Philip
Morris to Désirée
All right, so you’re determined to divorce me, Désirée. OK, so you hate my guts, but don’t break my heart. I mean, punish me if you must, but there’s no need to be downright sadistic about it. Unless you’re joking. You’re joking, yes? You didn’t really throw away the chance to sell the Corvair to Swallow? You didn’t actually advise him NOT to buy it? Swallow—very probably the only prospective purchaser of a used Corvair in the State of Euphoria. If by any chance Mr. Swallow is still thinking it over, get on the phone at once, please, and offer to come down a couple of hundred dollars. Offer green stamps and a tankful of gas, too, if that will help.
Désirée, your letter did nothing to lighten a heavy week. It isn’t true after all that there are no students at British universities: this week they returned from their prolonged Christmas vacation. Too bad, I was just beginning to get the hang of things. Now the teaching has thrown me back to square one. I swear the system here will be the death of me. Did I say system? A slip of the tongue. There is no system. They have something called tutorials, instead. Three students and me, for an hour at a time. We’re supposed to discuss some text I’ve assigned. This, apparently, can be anything that comes into my head, except that the campus bookshop doesn’t have anything that comes into my head. But supposing we manage to agree, me and the students, on some book of which four copies can be scratched together, one of them writes a paper and reads it out to the rest of us. After about three minutes the eyes of the other two glaze over and they begin to sag in their chairs. It’s clear they have stopped listening. I’m listening like hell but can’t understand a word because of the guy’s limey accent. All too soon, he stops. “Thank you,” I say, flashing him an appreciative smile. He looks at me reproachfully as he blows his nose, then carries on from where he paused, in mid-sentence. The other two students wake up briefly, exchange glances and snigger. That’s the most animation they ever show. When the guy reading the paper finally winds it up, I ask for comments. Silence. They avoid my eye. I volunteer a comment myself. Silence falls again. It’s so quiet you can hear the guy’s beard growing. Desperately I ask one of them a direct question. “And what did you think of the text, Miss Archer?” Miss Archer falls off her chair in a swoon.
Well, to be fair, it only happened once, and it had something to do with the kid’s period that she fainted, but somehow it seemed symbolic.
Believe it or not, I’m feeling quite homesick for Euphoric State politics. What this place needs is a few bomb outrages. They could begin by blowing up the Chairman of the English Department, one Gordon Masters, whose main interest is murdering wildlife and hanging the corpses on the walls of his office. He was captured at Dunkirk and spent the war in a POW camp. I can’t imagine how the Germans stood him. He runs the Department very much in the spirit of Dunkirk, as a strategic withdrawal against overwhelming odds, the odds being students, administrators, the Government, long hair on boys, short skirts on girls, promiscuity, Casebooks, ball-point pens—just about the whole modern world, in short. I knew he was mad the first time I saw him, or half-mad, because it only shows in one eye and he’s cunning enough to keep it closed most of the time, while he hypnotizes the faculty with the other one. They don’t seem to mind. The tolerance of people here is enough to turn your stomach.
If you notice a certain acidity in my prose today, and hypothesize some wound inflicted on that tender plant, my pride, you wouldn’t be far wrong, Désirée, my dear. I was in the Library today, looking through the files of The Times Literary Supplement for something, when quite by chance I turned up a long review of that Festschrift for Jackson Milestone that I contributed to in ’64, remember? No, of course, you make a point of forgetting anything I have written. Anyway, take my word for it, I wrote a dashing piece on “Apollonian-Dionysian Dialectic in the novels of Jane Austen” for this collection, but for some reason I had never seen this particular review before. Naturally I skimmed through the columns to see whether there was any comment
on my contribution, and sure enough there it is: “Turning to Professor Zapp’s essay…” and I can see at a glance that my piece is honoured with extensive discussion.
Imagine receiving a poison-pen letter, or an obscene telephone call, or discovering that a hired assassin has been following you about the streets all day with a gun aimed at the middle of your back. I mean, the shock of finding some source of anonymous malice in the world directed specifically at you, without being able to identify it or account for it. Because this guy really wanted to hurt. I mean, he wasn’t content merely to pour scorn on my arguments and my evidence and my accuracy and my style, to make my article out to be some kind of monument to imbecility and perversity in scholarship, no, he wanted my blood and my balls too, he wanted to beat my ego to a pulp.
Of course I need hardly say that the author was completely out of his mind, that his account of my essay was a travesty, and his own arguments riddled with false assumptions and errors of fact that a child could have seen through. But, but—this is the turn of the screw—there’s nothing I can do about it. I mean I can’t write to the TLS saying, in the usual style, “My attention has been drawn to a review published in your journal four years ago…” I should just look ridiculous. That’s what bugs me about the whole business—the time slip. It’s only just happened to me, but to everybody else it’s history. All these years I’ve been walking around with a wound I never knew had been inflicted. All my friends must have known—they must have seen the knife sticking out between my shoulder-blades—but not one sonofabitch had the decency to tell me. Afraid I’d bite their fucking heads off, I suppose, and so I would have done, but what are friends for anyway? And my enemy, who is he? Some PhD student I flunked? Some limey scholar whose book I chewed up in a footnote? Some guy whose mother I ran over in my car without noticing? Do you remember, Désirée, any exceptionally heavy bump in the road, driving somewhere four or five years ago?
Désirée, your concern that I should have a full sex-life while I am over here is touching, but you should think twice before you put such generous thoughts in writing: it could louse up your divorce petition, though I continue to hope that our marital problem is not terminal. In any case, I haven’t felt inclined to avail myself of your kind dispensation. They have winter here, you see, Désirée—the old seasonal bit, and the sap is sunk low at the moment.
Tell me more about the twins. Or, better, ask them to write a line to their old Dad, if the Euphoric public school system is still teaching such outdated skills as writing. But that is great about the gardening. O’Shea is what you might call an avant-gardener. He believes in randomness. His yard is a wilderness of weeds and heaps of coal and broken play equipment and wheelless prams and cabbages, silted-up bird baths and great gloomy trees slowly dying of some unspecified disease. I know how they must feel.
Love,
Morris
PS. I did write to M. but it was sent back marked Not Known Here. Try to get me her new address, will you, from the Dean of Students’ Office?
Hilary to Philip
Dearest,
Many thanks for your long and interesting letter. What a pity, though, that you had to write those words in it. Because I couldn’t of course let Amanda read it, though she pestered me for days. Rather thoughtless of you, dear, wasn’t it, because naturally the children are interested in your letters. And I must say it seemed to me quite uncalled for.
You didn’t tell me, by the way, that there was a bomb explosion in your building shortly after you arrived, but I suppose you didn’t want to worry us. Were you in any danger? If things get any worse you’ll just have to come home, and bother the money.
By the way, as you didn’t answer my question about the washing-machine I have bought a new one. Fully automatic and rather expensive, but it’s super.
I heard about the bomb from Mr. Zapp. A very curious encounter, which I must tell you about. He came round the other evening with Let’s Write a Novel, which he’d found in your room after all. It was the most awkward time, about 6, just as I was about to serve up the dinner, but I felt I had to invite him in since he’d taken the trouble to bring your book round and he looked rather pathetic standing in the slush outside the front door wearing galoshes and an absurd kind of cossack’s hat. He didn’t need any persuading—practically knocked me over in his eagerness to get in the house. I took him into the front room for a quick sherry, but it was like an iceberg—I don’t bother to light a fire in there now you’re away—so I had to take him into the dining-room, where the children were just beginning a fight because they were hungry for their dinner. I asked him if he would mind finishing his drink while I served the children their meal, hoping this would be a hint to him to leave promptly, but he said no, he didn’t mind and I should eat too, and he took off his hat and coat and sat down to watch us. And I mean watch us. His eyes followed every movement from dish to plate to mouth. It was acutely embarrassing. The children fell eerily silent, and I could see that Amanda and Robert were looking at each other and going red in the face with suppressed giggles. In the end I had to ask him if he wouldn’t like to join us at the table.
I don’t think I’ve ever seen anyone so heavily built move quite so fast. It was lucky that I’d cooked a biggish joint because there wasn’t much left on the bone by the time Mr. Zapp had had his third helping. Though his table manners left something to be desired, I didn’t really begrudge him the food, since he was obviously starved of decent home cooking. He also did his best to entertain the children, and made quite a hit with Amanda because he seemed to know all about her favourite pop songs—the names of the singers and the titles of the records and how high they had got in the Top Twenty and so on, which seemed to me quite extraordinary in a man of his age and profession, but impressed the children hugely, especially Amanda as I say. But I presumed he’d have the tact to scoot off fairly soon after dinner, and served coffee straight away to give him the hint. No such luck. He sat on and on, telling stories—admittedly rather funny ones—about the extraordinary household he is living in (a doctor called O’Shea—have you heard of him?) until eventually I just had to send Matthew off to bed and Robert and Amanda to do their homework. When I started ostentatiously clearing the table he insisted on helping me wash up. He obviously had no idea how to do it and broke two plates and a glass before I could stop him. By this time I was beginning to panic a bit, wondering if I was ever going to get him out of the house.
Then suddenly he completely changed. He asked me where the lavatory was and when he came back he was fully dressed in his outdoor clothes and scowling all over his face. He growled out a goodbye and a curt thank you and rushed out of the house into a whirling snowstorm. He started his car and let out the clutch far too quickly and as a result got stuck in the gutter. I listened to his wheels spinning and his engine howling until I couldn’t stand it any longer. So I put on my fur coat and boots and went out to give him a push. I got him out all right, but overbalanced in the process and fell sprawling.
As I picked myself off the ground I saw him disappear round the corner, skidding wildly, for he didn’t stop or even call out thank you. If Mrs. Zapp wants to divorce him she has my sympathy.
I saw Janet Dempsey again this morning (we seem to have fixed on the same day for supermarket shopping) and she said Robin knows that he’s definitely on Gordon’s list of nominations for senior lectureships. Are you on it? I think what gets me is the way Janet implies that I’m naturally going to be as fascinated by her husband’s career as she is. Also the pointed way she never refers to or asks about yours, as if it were a dead issue. Professor Zapp says you have to push yourself to get on in the academic world, that nobody ever gets anything unless they ask for it, and I’m inclined to think he’s right.
Do you still want me to send on Let’s Write a Novel? What a funny little book it is. There’s a whole chapter on how to write an epistolary novel, but surely nobody’s done that since the eighteenth century?
Love from all of us h
ere,
Hilary
Philip to Hilary
Darling,
Many thanks for your letter. What an extraordinary fellow Zapp seems to be. I hope he won’t bother you any more. Frankly, the more I hear about him, the less I like him. In particular, I shouldn’t like Amanda to see more of him than is absolutely unavoidable. The fact is that the man is entirely unprincipled where women are concerned, and while he’s not, as far as I know, another Humbert Humbert, I feel he might have an insidiously corrupting influence on an impressionable girl of Amanda’s age. So, at least, I infer from Mrs. Zapp, who recited a catalogue of her husband’s sins to me in the course of an extremely drunken and disorderly party to which we were both invited last Saturday. Our hosts were Sy and Bella Gootblatt. He’s a young associate professor here—very brilliant, I believe, has written the definitive study of Hooker. The Hogans were there, and three other couples all from the English Department, which may sound rather inbred, but you must remember that the English Department here is nearly as big as the entire Arts Faculty at Rummidge.
The tempo of a Plotinus dinner party takes some getting used to. To begin with, the invitation for eight really means eight-thirty to nine, as I realized from the consternation on my host’s face when I appeared on his doorstep one minute after the appointed hour; and even when all the guests are assembled there are several hours’ hard drinking to be got through before you actually sit down to eat. During this time the hostess (Bella Gootblatt in see-through blouse and flared crushed velvet trousers) brings from the kitchen delicious snacks—sausages rolled in crisp bacon, cheese fondue, sour-cream dips, tender hearts of artichokes, smoked fish and suchlike tangy delicacies, thus increasing one’s thirst for the lavish whisky-sours and daiquiris being prepared by the host. The consequence is that when you finally sit down to dine, at about eleven pm, everyone is totally sloshed and not very hungry. The food is half-spoiled anyway by being kept warm so long. Everybody drinks a great deal of wine to try and wash down a respectable amount of food and so they all get drunker than ever. Everybody is shouting at the tops of their voices and cracking jokes frenziedly and screaming with laughter and then someone will say something just a bit too outrageous and suddenly there’s murder in the air.
