David Lodge - Small World (44 page)

“Percy!” Morris exclaims, grasping the newcomer by his shoulders and giving him a welcoming shake. “How are you? What are you doing in Jerusalem? You’re just too late for the conference, Philip Swallow has caught the Black Death and we’re all running away.”

The young man looks round the lobby. “Is Angelica here?”

“Al Pabst? No, she isn’t. Why?”

The young man’s shoulders slump. “Oh, Jaysus, I was sure I’d find her here.”

“She never signed up for this conference, as far as I know.”

“It must be the only one, then,” says the young man bitterly. “I’ve pursued that girl around the world from one country to another. Europe, America, Asia. I’ve spent all my savings and had my American Express card withdrawn for non-payment of arrears. I had to work my passage from Hong Kong to Aden, and hitchhiked across the desert and nearly died of thirst. And never a sight nor sound of her have I had since she gave me the slip at Rummidge.”

Morris Zapp sucks on his cigar. “I didn’t realize you were so interested in the girl,” he says. Why don’t you just write to her?”

“Because nobody knows where she lives! She’s always moving on from one conference to another.”

Morris Zapp ponders. “Don’t despair, Percy. I’ll tell you what to do: come to the next MLA. Anybody who’s a conference freak is sure to be at the MLA.”

“When is that?”

“December. In New York.”

“Jaysus,” wails the young man. “Must I wait that long?”

Rodney Wainwright leans forward and touches him on the arm. “Excuse me, young man,” he says, “but would you mind very much not taking the Lord’s name in vain?”

At the University of Darlington, it is deep summer vacation. The campus is largely deserted. The lecture rooms are silent save for the flies that buzz at the windows; the common rooms and corridors are empty and eerily clean. The rooms of the faculty are locked, and in the Departmental offices underemployed secretaries knit and gossip and bluetack to the walls brightly coloured picture postcards sent to them from Cornwall or Corfu by their more fortunate friends. Only in the Computer Centre has nothing changed since the summer term ended and the vacation began. There sit the two men in their familiar attitudes, like cat and mouse, spider and fly, the one crouched over his computer console, the other watching from his glass cubicle, his hand moving rhythmically from a bag of potato chips to his mouth and back again.

Robin Dempsey seems to have grown old in his swivel seat—Persse McGarrigle would scarcely recognize the thickset, broadshouldered, vigorous man who had accosted him at the Rummidge sherry party.

These shoulders are hunched now, the blue suit hangs limply from them over a wasted torso, the jaw sags rather than thrusts, and the small eyes seem even smaller, set even closer together, than before. The atmosphere is charged. There is a tension in the room, like static electricity, a sense of things moving to a crisis. The only sounds are the tapping of Robin Dempsey’s fingers on the keyboard of his computer terminal, and the crunching of Josh Collins’s potato chips.

Josh Collins screws up the empty bag and tosses it into the waste basket, without taking his eyes off Robin Dempsey. Now there is only one sound in the room. Very quietly, stealthily, Josh Collins leaves his glass cubicle and tiptoes towards the hunched, frenziedly typing figure of Robin Dempsey. Robin Dempsey suddenly stops typing, and Josh Collins freezes in unison, but he is close enough to read what is printed on the screen: I CAN’T GO ON LIKE THIS I’M OBSESSED WITH PHILIP SWALLOW MORNING NOON AND NIGHT ALL I CAN THINK ABOUT IS HIM GETTING THE UNESCO CHAIR I CAN’T BEAR THE THOUGHT OF IT BUT I CAN’T STOP THINKING ABOUT IT THE WHOLE WORLD SEEMS TO CONSPIRE AGAINST ME IF I FORGET HIM FOR A MOMENT I’M SURE TO OPEN A JOURNAL AND SEE SOME SYCOPHANTIC REVIEW OF HIS BLOODY BOOK OR AN ADVERTISEMENT FOR IT FULL OF QUOTATIONS SAYING IT’S THE GREATEST THING SINCE SLICED BREAD AND THIS MORNING I GOT A LETTER FROM MY SON DESMOND HE’S IN ISRAEL WORKING ON A KIBBUTZ HE SAID MATTHEW SWALLOW THAT’S SWALLOW’S BOY IS OUT HERE WITH ME YESTERDAY HE MET HIS DAD WITH HIS ARM ROUND A GOODLOOKING BLONDE BIRD HE WAS AT SOME CONFERENCE IN JERUSALEM AT LEAST THAT WAS HIS STORY YOU SEE WHAT I MEAN SWALLOW IS HAVING IT ALL WAYS SEX AND FAME AND FOREIGN TRAVEL ITS NOT FAIR I CAN’T STAND IT I’M GOING CRAZY WHAT SHALL I DO Robin Dempsey pauses, hesitates for a moment, then presses the query key: ?

Instantly ELIZA replies: SHOOT YOURSELF.

Robin Dempsey stares, gapes, trembles, whimpers, covers his face with his hands. Then he hears from behind him a snigger, a splutter of suppressed laughter, and swivels round on his seat to find Josh Collins grinning at him. Robin Dempsey looks from the grinning face to the computer’s screen, and back again.

“You—” he says in a choked voice.

“Just a little joke,” says Josh Collins, raising his hands in a pacifying gesture.

“You’ve been tampering with ELIZA,” says Robin Dempsey. getting slowly to his feet.

“Now, now,” says Josh Collins, backing away. “Keep calm.”

“You made ELIZA say Swallow would get the UNESCO chair.”

“You provoked me,” says Josh Collins. “It’s your own fault.”

With a cry of rage, Robin Dempsey hurls himself upon Josh Collins. The two men grapple with each other, lurching round the room and banging into the equipment. They fall to the ground and roll across the floor, shouting and screaming abuse. One of the machines, jolted by a flying elbow or knee, stutters into life and begins to disgorge reams of printout which unfurls itself and becomes entangled in the wrestlers’ flailing limbs. The printout consists of one word, endlessly repeated: ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR ERROR Part V One THE MODERN LANGUAGE ASSOCIATION OF AMERICA is not, to British ears at any rate, a very appropriately named organization. It is as concerned with literature as with language, and with English as well as with those Continental European languages conventionally designated “modern”. Indeed, making up by far the largest single group in the membership of the MLA are teachers of English and American literature in colleges and universities. The MLA is a professional association, which has some influence over conditions of employment, recruitment, curriculum development, etc., in American higher education. It also publishes a fat quarterly, closely printed in double columns, devoted to scholarly research, known as PMLA, and a widely-used annual bibliography of work published in book or periodical form in all of the many subject areas that come within its purview. But to its members the MLA is best known, and loved, or hated, for its annual convention. Indeed, if you pronounce the acronym “MLA” to an American academic, he will naturally assume that you are referring not to the Association as such, nor to its journal or its bibliography, but to its convention. This is always held over three days in the week between Christmas and New Year, either in New York or in some other big American city. The participants are mostly, but not exclusively American, since the Association has funds to bring distinguished foreign scholars and creative writers to take part, and less distinguished ones can sometimes persuade their own universities to pay their fares, or may be spending the year in the United States anyway. In recent years the average attendance at this event has been around ten thousand.

The MLA is the Big Daddy of conferences. A megaconference. A three-ring circus of the literary intelligentsia. This year it is meeting in New York, in two adjacent skyscraper hotels, the Hilton and the Americana, which, enormous as they are, cannot actually sleep all the delegates, who spill over into neighbouring hotels, or beg accommodation from their friends in the big city. Imagine ten thousand highlyeducated, articulate, ambitious, competitive men and women converging on mid-Manhattan on the 27th of December, to meet and to lecture and to question and to discuss and to gossip and to plot and to philander and to party and to hire or be hired. For the MLA is a market as well as a circus, it is a place where young scholars fresh from graduate school look hopefully for their first jobs, and more seasoned academics sniff the air for better ones. The bedrooms of the Hilton and the Americana are the scene not only of rest and dalliance but of hard bargaining and rigorous interviewing, as chairmen of departments from every state in the Union, from Texas to Maine, from the Carolinas to California, strive to fill the vacancies on their faculty rolls with the best talent available. In the present acute job shortage, it’s a buyer’s market, and some of these chairmen have such long lists of candidates to interview that they never get outside their hotel rooms for the duration of the convention. For them and for the desperate candidates kicking their heels and smoking in the corridors, waiting their turn to be scrutinized, the MLA is no kind of fun; but for the rest of the members it’s a ball, especially if you like listening to lectures and panel discussions on every conceivable literary subject from “Readability and Reliability in the Epistolary Novel of England, France and Germany” to “Death, Resurrection and Redemption in the Works of Pirandello,” from “Old English Riddles” to “Faulkner Concordances”, from “Rationalismus and Irrationalismus im 18. Jahrhundert” to “Nueva Narrativa Hispanoamericana,” from “Lesbian-Feminist Teaching and Learning” to “Problems of Cultural Distortion in Translating Expletives in the work of Cortazar, Sender, Baudelaire and Flaubert.”

There are no less than six hundred separate sessions listed in the official programme, which is as thick as the telephone directory of a small town, and at least thirty to choose from at any hour of the day from 8.30 a.m. to 10.15 p.m., some of them catering to small groups of devoted specialists, others, featuring the most distinguished names in academic life, attracting enough auditors to fill the hotels’ biggest ballrooms. The audiences are, however, restless and migratory: people stroll in and out of the conference rooms, listen a while, ask a question, and move on to another session while speakers are still speaking; for there is always the feeling that you may be missing the best show of the day, and a roar of laughter or applause from one room is quite likely to empty the one next door. And if you get tired of listening to lectures and papers and panel discussions, there is plenty else to do. You can attend the cocktail party organized by the Gay Caucus for the Modern Languages, or the Reception Sponsored by the American Association of Professors of Yiddish, or the Cash Bar Arranged in Conjunction with the Special Session on Methodological Problems in Monolingual and Bilingual Lexicography, or the Annual Dinner of the American Milton Society, or the Executive Council of the American Boccaccio Association, or the meetings of the Marxist Literary Group, the Coalition of Women in German, the Conference on. Christianity and Literature, the Byron Society, the G. K. Chesterton Society, the Nathaniel Hawthorne Society, the Hazlitt Society, the D. H. Lawrence Society, the John Updike Society, and many others. Or you can just stand in the lobby of the Hilton and meet, sooner or later, everyone you ever knew in the academic world.

Persse McGarrigle is standing there, on the third morning of the conference, rubbing the warmth back into his hands, half-frozen by the bitterly cold wind blowing down the Avenue of the Americas, when he is greeted by Morris Zapp.

“Hi, Percy! How are ya liking the MLA?”

“It’s… I can’t find a word for it.”

Morris Zapp chuckles expansively. He is wearing his loudest check sports jacket, and toting a huge cigar. He is obviously in his element. Every few seconds somebody comes up and slaps him on the shoulder or shakes his hand or kisses him on his cheek. “Morris, how are you? What are you working on? Where are you staying? Let’s have a drink some time, let’s have dinner, let’s have breakfast.” Morris shouts, waves, kisses, signals with his eyebrows, scribbles appointments in his diary, while contriving to advise Persse on which lectures to catch and which to avoid, and to ask him if he has seen any sign of Al Pabst.

“No,” sighs Persse dejectedly. “She’s not listed in the programme.”

“That doesn’t mean a thing, lots of people sign up after the programme has gone to press.”

“The Convention Office doesn’t have her name among the late registrations,” says Persse. “I’m afraid she hasn’t come.”

“Don’t despair, Percy, some people sneak in without registering, to save the fee.”

“That’s my own case,” Persse confesses. He is still paying off the cost of his trip round the world, and it has been a struggle to raise the money to get here; how he is going to get home is a problem he hasn’t yet faced.

“You want to cruise around the various meetings, looking out for the subjects that are likely to interest her.”

“That’s what I’ve been doing.”

“Whatever you do, don’t miss the forum on ‘The Function of Criticism’, 2.15 this afternoon in the Grand Ballroom.”

“Are you speaking?”

“How did you guess? This is the big one, Percy. Arthur Kingfisher is moderator. The buzz is that he’s going to decide who is his favoured candidate for the UNESCO Chair today. Sam Textel is here, ready to take the good news back to Paris. This forum is like a TV debate for Presidential candidates.”

“Who else is speaking?”

“Michel Tardieu, von Turpitz, Fulvia Morgana and Philip Swallow.”

Persse registers surprise. “Is Professor Swallow in the same league as the rest of you?”

“Well, originally they invited Rudyard Parkinson, but he missed his plane—we just got a call from London. He was trying to put us in our place by only turning up for the last day of the Convention. Serves him right. Philip Swallow was here for the Hazlitt Society, so they drafted him in as a substitute for Parkinson. He was born lucky, Philip. He always seems to fall on his feet.”

“He didn’t have Legionnaire’s Disease after all, then?”

“Nuh. As I thought, it was just heat-stroke. He’d been reading an article about Legionnaire’s Disease in Time magazine and frightened himself into reproducing the symptoms. Hilary flew out to Israel to look after him quite unnecessarily. However, it had the effect of bringing them together again. Philip decided he was getting to the age when he needed a mother more than a mistress. Or maybe Joy did. But you didn’t know Joy, did you?”