Deaf Sentence

by David Lodge

  6

  7 th November. I got up this morning before Fred and was having my breakfast when she came into the kitchen in her dressing gown. She said ‘Good morning, darling,’ and then, going over to the stove, said something else which I didn’t catch because I wasn’t wearing my hearing aid; I took it out last night in the family bathroom, which is my bathroom when there are no family or other guests in the house, before going to bed, and it was still there. I said ‘What?’ and she repeated the utterance, but I still didn’t get it. She was opening and shutting drawers and cupboards as she spoke, which didn’t help. ‘Sorry,’ I said, ‘I haven’t got my hearing aid in - it’s upstairs.’ She turned to face me and said more loudly what sounded like ‘long stick’. I said, ‘What do you want a long stick for?’ My mind was already considering the possibilities - to recover something that had rolled under the bed? Or fallen down the back of a chest of drawers? She came closer and said, ‘Saucepan. Long-stick saucepan.’ ‘What’s a long-stick saucepan?’ I said. ‘You mean a long-handled saucepan?’ She raised her eyes to the heavens in despair, and went back to the stove. I thought about it for a minute or two, and then the penny dropped. ‘Oh, you mean non-stick saucepan! It’s in the top right-hand cupboard.’ But I was too late: she was already making her porridge in a stainless steel saucepan which would be much more trouble to clean afterwards. And it was my fault for putting the non-stick one away yesterday in the wrong place.

  Fred sat down at the kitchen table, propped up the Guardian tabloid section against the marmalade jar, and began to read with silent concentration. I had intended to mention casually over breakfast that I would be meeting Alex this afternoon. I had a little speech prepared: ‘Yes, d’you remember the young woman I was talking to at the ARC show last week? The blonde one? It was so noisy that I literally didn’t hear a word she said, but it seems she’s doing research of some kind, with a linguistics angle I presume, because apparently I agreed to give her some advice about it. She phoned to complain because I hadn’t turned up for our appointment, though I haven’t the faintest memory of making one. Embarrassing really. I more or less had to agree to meet her . . .’ But because of the contretemps over the non-stick saucepan it seemed an unpropitious moment to make this announcement, and I let it pass. I will have to tell Fred about the meeting after it has happened, when it will be far more difficult to explain.

  ‘My mother’s deafness is very trifling you see - just nothing at all. By only raising my voice, and saying anything two or three times over, she is sure to hear; but then she is used to my voice,’ says Miss Bates in Emma. How subtly Jane Austen hints at the politely disguised frustration and irritation of the company at having to bear the repetition of every banal remark in louder and louder tones for the benefit of old Mrs Bates. I must be in a worse state than my fictional name-sake, because I’m used to Fred’s voice, but I still can’t hear what she’s saying without a hearing aid.

  Is there anything to be said in favour of deafness? Any saving grace? Any enhancement of the other senses? I don’t think so - not in my case anyway. Maybe in Goya’s. I read a book about Goya which said it was his deafness that made him into a major artist. Until he was in his mid-forties he was a competent but conventional painter of no great originality; then he contracted some mysterious paralytic illness which deprived him of sight, speech and hearing for several weeks. When he recovered he was stone deaf, and remained so for the rest of his life. All his greatest work belongs to the deaf period of his life: the Caprices, the Disasters of War, the Proverbs, the Black Paintings. All the dark, nightmarish ones. This critic said it was as if his deafness had lifted a veil: when he looked at human behaviour undistracted by the babble of speech he saw it for what it was, violent, malicious, cynical and mad, like a dumb-show in a lunatic asylum. I saw the Black Paintings some years ago, when I was in Madrid on a British Council lecture tour, and went back to the Prado twice for another look. Goya painted them as murals for his house in the country - the local people called it La Quinta del Sordo, the House of the Deaf Man - slapping the paint straight on to the plaster, but later they were lifted off the walls and transferred on to canvas. Now they’re in the Prado, Saturn Devouring His Children, The Witches’ Sabbath, Fight With Clubs and the rest, predominantly black in pigment as well as subject matter. But the one that always has the most spectators lingering in front of it, intrigued and puzzled, is lighter in colour tone than the others. It’s known as the Dog Overwhelmed By Sand (none of these titles was Goya’s). It might be a modern Abstract Expressionist painting, composed of three great planes of predominantly brownish colour, two vertical and one horizontal, if it wasn’t for the head of a little black dog at the bottom of the picture, painted almost in cartoon style, buried up to its neck in what might be sand, looking upwards pathetically and apprehensively at a descending mass of more of the same stuff. There are lots of theories about what the picture means, like the End of the Enlightenment, or the Advent of Modernity, but I know what it means to me: it’s an image of deafness, deafness pictured as an imminent, inevitable, inexorable suffocation.

  Did Goya, I wonder, think he owed his greatness as an artist to his deafness? Was he grateful for the illness which deprived him of his hearing? Somehow I doubt it. But it must have crossed his mind that he was fortunate to have lost that sense rather than sight. In practical terms deafness is no handicap at all to a painter, in fact it could even be an advantage, an aid to concentration - not having to make conversation with your sitters for instance. Whereas for a musician it’s the worst thing that could happen to you. Beethoven is the great example. I read a book about him too, Thayer’s Life - I have a kind of morbid interest in the great deafies of the past. I was surprised to discover how young he was when he became deaf, only twenty-eight. He caught a chill which developed into a serious illness, not quite as severe as Goya’s, but it left him with impaired hearing, hair-cell damage probably, which steadily worsened for the rest of his life. When he first became aware of it, he was chiefly known as a virtuoso musician and conductor, careers that were obviously impossible to pursue with hearing loss, and that was why from then onwards he concentrated exclusively on composing. So I suppose you could argue that deafness was responsible for his greatness as an artist too, like Goya’s, but Beethoven certainly didn’t look at it in that way, as a blessing in disguise. He was distraught when he realised he was losing his hearing, searched frantically for cures (none of which worked of course), and was afflicted with spells of deep depression, cursing his Maker and sometimes contemplating suicide. He swore to secrecy those of his friends in whom he confided his plight, fearing that he would lose all professional credibility if it became widely known. And for a long time he was surprisingly successful in concealing it, partly by avoiding society, and partly by feigning absent-mindedness when he failed to hear something said to him. But as all deafies know, these strategies have a certain cost: they make the subject seem withdrawn, unsociable, curmudgeonly. Six years after he began to go deaf, when he had given up hope of a cure, Beethoven wrote a letter, addressed to his two brothers, but in a way to everybody who knew him, evidently designed to be read after his death, explaining the ‘secret cause’ of his off-putting temperament and manner. It’s known as the Heiligenstadt Testament, because he wrote it in a little village of that name outside Vienna to which he had withdrawn for six months of solitary rest on the advice of his doctor. I copied it from Thayer, and have it on file. It begins like this:

  Oh you men who think or say that I am malevolent, stubborn or misanthropic, how greatly do you wrong me. You do not know the secret cause which makes me seem that way to you . . . It was impossible for me to say, to people, ‘Speak louder, shout, for I am deaf.’ Ah, how could I possibly admit to an infirmity in the one sense which ought to be more perfect in me than in others, a sense which I once possessed in the highest perfection, a perfection such as few in my profession enjoy . . . Oh, I cannot do it, therefore forgive me when you see me draw back when I woul
d gladly have mingled with you. My misfortune is doubly painful to me because I am bound to be misunderstood; for me there can be no relaxation with my fellow-men, no refined conversations, no mutual exchange of ideas, I must live alone like someone who has been banished.

  It’s a very poignant document, an outpouring of suppressed emotion, a cry wrung from the heart. Sometimes, he says, he would yield to the desire for companionship.

  But what a humiliation for me when someone standing next to me heard a flute in the distance and I heard nothing, or someone heard a shepherd singing and again I heard nothing. Such incidents drove me almost to despair, a little more of that and I would have ended my life - it was only my art that held me back. Ah, it seemed to me impossible to leave the world until I had brought forth all that I felt was within me.

  The references to the flute and the shepherd remind me of Philip Larkin, unable to hear the larks singing in the sky when he was walking with Monica Jones in the Shetlands. They also evoke the Pastoral Symphony, which Beethoven composed six years later, a supreme musical evocation of sounds that he himself hadn’t heard for more than a decade. Nor could he hear the music itself when it was performed. I suppose he heard something - but what? A faint distorted version of the score, like a concert heard on a cheap portable radio with a fading battery? Or was he able, by watching the musicians, to recreate in his imagination the full richness of symphonic sound, and hear it inside his head like a modern iPod user? I fear the former is more likely.

  What comfort can I draw from these case histories? Not much. Both men happened to be geniuses and found some kind of compensation for their affliction in their art. I’m neither a genius nor an artist. I suppose a linguist who can’t hear what people are saying is more like a deaf musician than a deaf painter, so I can identify more readily with Beethoven than with Goya. But I can’t claim that only my work on discourse analysis has held me back from despair these last twenty years, or that I feel it impossible to leave the world until I have given it my last thoughts on, say, topic-drift and skip-connecting in casual conversation, which I could still do using transcripts of recorded speech. In fact I have given the world my last thoughts on those and similar subjects, some time ago. So what will I have to live for, when social and sexual intercourse are effectively at an end too? Let us not enquire further into that question.

  7

  8th November. I met Alex Loom yesterday, as arranged. That’s her surname, Loom: it was written beside the bell push for flat 36 outside the entrance to Wharfside Court, the apartment block where she lives. An unusual name, easy to remember, and because it was written down I know I’ve got it right. I’m not so confident about anything else that I gathered in the course of the afternoon, because much of what she told me was surprising and she tends to drop her voice at crucial points in her utterances so that I was never quite sure whether I had understood her correctly. What follows is a tidied up, disambiguated and not altogether reliable record of our conversation.

  Like so many industrial cities, ours has collaborated with British Waterways on refurbishing its canals in recent years, to make them attractive and accessible as a leisure amenity: smartening up the towpaths, painting the locks, erecting signposts and lamp standards of retro design, encouraging people to walk, jog and cycle on the paths. There has also been a lot of new property development alongside the canal that zigzags through the city centre in the form of apartments, aimed at the buy-to-rent market. Alex’s flat is in one of the cheaper-looking buildings, a four-storey block in a style Fred calls Lego Postmodern, bright red brick with green plastic features pasted on, overlooking a kind of backwater at the end of which an unsightly scum of half-submerged non-biodegradable garbage has accumulated. It took me quite a while to find it, since the address Alex had given me isn’t in my dog-eared A-to-Z. I drove through an area of vacant lots, derelict warehouses and small workshops until I reached the car park behind Wharfside Court. I was surprised by how quiet the place seemed: the traffic of the city centre only half a mile away was just a murmur, and there was nobody about. It was the middle of the afternoon, when most residents would be at work, but the near-silence seemed eerie in the middle of this city of over half a million people; indeed the city itself looked unfamiliar seen from this angle, all its landmarks - the Castle Keep, the Town Hall campanile, the ziggurat Hilton - rearranged, as if it had been turned inside out. It was a cold, clear afternoon, with good visibility. The sun was low, casting long, sharp shadows over the deserted towpaths, like one of Chirico’s spell-bound paintings.

  The unnatural quiet, I suddenly realised, was enhanced by the fact that I wasn’t wearing my hearing aid. I prefer to drive without it when I’m on my own because it makes my four-year-old Ford Focus seem as noiseless as a Mercedes. Having inserted the little plastic hearing machines in my ears I pressed the bell for flat 36, and heard Alex’s voice through the crackling of the entryphone: ‘Hi. It’s on the third floor, I’m afraid you’ll have to walk up, the elevator’s out of order.’ I ascended three flights of raw, dusty, untreated concrete stairs, and she was waiting at the open door of her flat when, a little out of breath, I arrived. She was wearing black trousers and a black V-neck sweater, with little make-up, except around her eyes, accentuating their intense blue. It’s like the blue of the Microsoft desktop, luminous but opaque. ‘The elevator is out of order most of the time,’ she said with an apologetic smile. ‘I keep calling the management company but nothing happens. Come in.’

  It’s a small flat: one bedroom, bathroom with loo, and a kitchenette off the living room. She took my overcoat and hung it up in the tiny hall, then ushered me into the living room. It is not much bigger than Dad’s, but lighter and brighter. A laptop was open on a table, its abstract screen-saver pattern restlessly dissolving and re-forming, and there was a shelf unit against one wall holding books, box files and ring-binders. The other walls were decorated with modern reproductions and posters - I recognised a Munch painting of a thin naked adolescent girl sitting on a bed.Two upright chairs, a small sofa, an easy chair, a coffee table, a white two-drawer filing cabinet, a radio/CD player and a small flat-screen TV completed the furniture, most of which looked as if it had come quite recently from Ikea. She smiled and spread her hands. ‘Chez moi,’ she said.

  I went across to the window, which faced a similar apartment building across the canal backwater. ‘Nice view,’ I said politely. ‘Have you lived here long?’

  ‘Not very long,’ she said.

  ‘Did you buy it?’

  ‘Lord, no!’ She laughed. ‘I rent - but it’s quite cheap. The owners are pretty desperate, there’s a lot on the market. Most of the apartments in this block are unoccupied.’

  ‘Doesn’t that make you feel rather lonely?’

  ‘No, I like it. It’s very quiet. Good for writing up my research.’

  ‘Research into what?’ I asked.

  ‘Let me make a pot of tea first. Earl Grey or Assam? Or herbal?’

  I chose Assam, and she went into the little kitchenette, which opened off the living room without a dividing door. I sat down in the easy chair, but I did not feel at ease. It crossed my mind for some reason that nobody knew I was here. She said something in which I seemed to hear the word ‘suicide’. I jumped to my feet and took a step towards the kitchenette. ‘I beg your pardon?’ I said.

  She came out of the kitchenette with the tea things on a tray. ‘Suicide notes,’ she said, putting the tray down on the coffee table. As she stooped over the table the neckline of her sweater gaped and I glimpsed the shadowy division of her breasts, as I had at the gallery. ‘That’s my PhD topic. A stylistic analysis of suicide notes.’

  I was about to ask how she got interested in the subject, but stopped myself in case I would be trespassing on sensitive personal territory. She noticed my hesitation, and laughed. ‘I can see you’re wondering why I chose such a morbid subject. Everybody does. I was dating this clinical psychologist at Columbia a while back and he was doing a content-analys
is of suicide notes for purposes of risk assessment, comparing notes by successful and unsuccessful suicideattempters. He’d acquired a small corpus and I thought it would be interesting to analyse them stylistically, you know? Like, are they a genre? Do people under such extreme stress fall back on rhetorical formulae? Or does their desperation make them transcend the normal limits of their expressive skills?’

  ‘How can you tell,’ I said, ‘without getting hold of other writings by these unfortunate people?’

  ‘You can’t, of course, except from internal evidence - every now and then you get a sentence that rises expressively way above the rest of the discourse. But that’s only one aspect of my dissertation.’

  I asked her where she was doing the PhD, and was surprised to learn that she is a postgraduate student in our English Department, being supervised by Colin Butterworth.

  ‘Why in England, rather than America?’ I asked.‘You are American, I take it?’ Her accent was not strongly marked by any drawl or twang, but it was unmistakable.