David Lodge - Small World (26 page)

“Then we went to Anitkabir to lay a wreath on Ataturk’s tomb.”

“Whatever for?”

“Mr Custer thought it would be a nice gesture. And a funny thing happened. I will tell you.” Akbil suddenly shed his drowsiness at the memory, and propped himself up on one elbow to tell Oya the story. “You know it is quite an awe-inspiring experience, the first time you go to Anitkabir. To walk down that long, long concourse, with the Hittite lions and the other statues, and the soldiers standing guard on the parapets, so still and silent they look like statues themselves, but all armed. Perhaps I should not have told Professor Swallow that it was a capital offence to show disrespect to the memory of Ataturk.”

“Well, so it is.”

“I said it as a kind of joke. However he seemed to be very worried by the information. He kept saying, ‘Is it all right if I blow my nose?’ and ‘Will the soldiers be suspicious of my limp?’ “

“Does he have a limp?”

“Since he fell down at the airport he has a slight limp, yes. Anyway, Mr Custer told him, ‘Don’t worry, just do exactly as I do.’ So we march down the concourse, Mr Custer in front carrying the wreath, and Professor Swallow and I following in step, under the eyes of the soldiers. We swung left into the Great Meeting Place, very smartly, just like soldiers ourselves, and approached the Hall of Honour. And then Mr Custer had the misfortune to trip over a paving stone that was sticking up and, being impeded by the wreath, fell on to his hands and knees. Before I could stop him, Professor Swallow flung himself to the ground and lay prostrate like a Muslim at prayer.”

Oya gasped and giggled. “And what happened next?”

“We picked him up and dusted him down again. Then we laid the wreath and visited the museum. Then we went back to the British Council office to discuss Professor Swallow’s programme. He must be a man of immense learning.”

“Why do you say that?”

“Well, you know that he has come here to lecture on Hazlitt because it was the centenary last year. The other lecture he offered was on Jane Austen, and only our fourth-year students have read her books. So we asked the British Council if he could possibly offer a lecture on some broader topic, such as Literature and History, or Literature and Society, or Literature and Philosophy…” Akbil Borak yawned and closed his eyes. He seemed to have lost the thread of his story.

“Well?” said Oya, poking him impatiently in the ribs with her elbow.

“Well, apparently the message was somewhat garbled in the telex transmission. It said, please would he give a lecture on Literature and History and Society and Philosophy and Psychology. And, do you know, he agreed. He has prepared a lecture on Literature and Everything. We had a good laugh about it.”

“Professor Swallow laughed?”

“Well, Mr Custer laughed the most,” Akbil conceded.

“Poor Professor Swallow,” Oya sighed. “I do not think he had a very nice day.”

“In the evening it was better,” said Akbil. “I took him to a kebab restaurant and we had a good meal and some raki. We talked about Hull.”

“He knows Hull?”

“Strangely, he has never been there,” said Akbil. “So I was able to tell him all about it.”

He turned onto his side, with his back to Oya, and pulled the quilt over his shoulders. Accepting that he would not talk any more, Oya settled herself to sleep. She stretched out a hand to switch off the bedside lamp, but, an instant before her fingers reached the switch, the light went out of its own accord.

“Another power cut,” she remarked to her husband. But he was already breathing deeply in sleep.

“The trouble is,” said Ronald Frobisher, “that twat Wainwright and that ponce Parkinson are right about one thing. I’ve dried up. Been blocked on a novel for six years now. Haven’t published one for eight.” He gazed mournfully into his tankard of real ale. Persse was still on Guinness. They were in the saloon bar of a pub off the Strand. “So I earn a living from the telly. Adapting my own novels or other people’s. The odd episode of
Z-Cars
or
The Sweeney
. The occasional `Play for Today’.”

“It’s strange that you can still write drama, but not fiction.”

“Ah well, you see, I can do dialogue all right,” said Frobisher. “And somebody else does the pictures. But with fiction it’s the narrative bits that give the writing its individuality. Descriptions of people, places, weather, stuff like that. It’s like ale that’s been kept in the wood: the flavour of the wood permeates the beer. Telly drama’s like keg in comparison: all gas and no flavour. It’s style I’m talking about, the special, unique way a writer has of using language. Well, you’re a poet, you know what I’m talking about.”

“I do,” said Persse.

“I had a style once,” said Frobisher wistfully. “But I lost it. Or rather I lost faith in it. Same thing, really. Have another?”

“It’s my round,” said Persse, getting to his feet. But he was obliged to return from the bar emptyhanded. “This is very embarrassing,” he said, “but I’m going to have to ask you for a loan. All I have is some Irish punts and a cheque for one thousand pounds. The barman refused to cash it.”

“It’s all right. Have another drink on me,” said Frobisher, proffering a ten pound note.

“I’ll borrow this off you if I may,” said Persse.

“What are you going to spend it on, the thousand pounds?” Frobisher asked him when he returned with the drinks, gripping a packet of potato crisps between his teeth.

“Looking for a girl,” said Persse indistinctly.

“Looking for the Grail?”

“A girl. Her name is Angelica. Have some crisps.”

“No thanks. Nice name. Where does she live?”

“That’s the problem. I don’t know.”

“Good-looking?”

“Beautiful.”

“You know that American Professor’s wife back at the party? She made a pass at me.”

“She made a pass at me too,” said Persse. Frobisher looked mildly disappointed by this information. He began to eat crisps in an abstracted sort of way. In no time at all there was nothing left in the bag except a few crumbs and grains of salt. “How did you come to lose faith in your style?” Persse enquired.

“I’ll tell you. I can date it precisely from a trip I made to Darlington six years ago. There’s a new university there, you know, one of those plateglass and poured-concrete affairs on the edge of the town. They wanted to give me an honorary degree. Not the most prestigious university in the world, but nobody else had offered to give me a degree. The idea was, Darlington’s a working-class, industrial town, so they’d honour a writer who wrote about working-class, industrial life. I bought that. I was sort of flattered, to tell you the truth. So I went up there to receive this degree. The usual flummery of robes and bowing and lifting your cap to the vice-chancellor and so on. Bloody awful lunch. But it was all right, I didn’t mind. But then, when the official part was over, I was nobbled by a man in the English Department. Name of Dempsey.”

“Robin Dempsey,” said Persse.

“Oh, you know him? Not a friend of yours, I hope?”

“Definitely not.”

“Good. Well, as you probably know, this Dempsey character is gaga about computers. I gathered this over lunch, because he was sitting opposite me. ‘I’d like to take you over to our Computer Centre this afternoon,’ he said. ‘We’ve got something set up for you that I think you’ll find interesting.’ He was sort of twitching in his seat with excitement as he said it, like a kid who can’t wait to unwrap his Christmas presents. So when the degree business was finished, I went with him to this Computer Centre. Rather grand name, actually, it was just a prefabricated hut, with a couple of sheep cropping the grass outside. There was another chap there, sort of running the place, called Josh. But Dempsey did all the talking. ‘You’ve probably heard,’ he said, ‘of our Centre for Computational Stylistics. “No,’ I said, ‘Where is it?’ `Where? Well, it’s here, I suppose,’ he said. ‘I mean, I’m it, so it’s wherever I am. That is, wherever I am when I’m doing computational stylistics, which is only one of my research interests. It’s not so much a place,’ he said, ‘as a headed notepaper. Anyway,’ he went on, ‘when we heard that the University was going to give you an honorary degree, we decided to make yours the first complete corpus in our tape archive.’ `What does that mean?’ I said. `It means,’ he said, holding up a flat metal canister rather like the sort you keep film spools in, ‘It means that every word you’ve ever published is in here.’ His eyes gleamed with a kind of manic glee, like he was Frankenstein, or some kind of wizard, as if he had me locked up in that flat metal box. Which, in a way, he had. ‘What’s the use of that?’ I asked. ‘What’s the use of it?’ he said, laughing hysterically. `What’s the use? Let’s show him, Josh.’ And he passed the canister to the other guy, who takes out a spool of tape and fits it on to one of the machines. ‘Come over here,’ says Dempsey, and sits me down in front of a kind of typewriter with a TV screen attached. ‘With that tape,’ he said, ‘we can request the computer to supply us with any information we like about your ideolect. “Come again?’ I said. ‘Your own special, distinctive, unique way of using the English language. What’s your favourite word?’ `My favourite word? I don’t have one.’ `Oh yes you do!’ he said. ‘The word you use most frequently.’ `That’s probably
the
or
a
or
and
,’ I said. He shook his head impatiently. ‘We instruct the computer to ignore what we call grammatical words—articles, prepositions, pronouns, modal verbs, which have a high frequency rating in all discourse. Then we get to the real nitty-gritty, what we call the lexical words, the words that carry a distinctive semantic content. Words like
love
or
dark
or
heart
or
God
. Let’s see.’ So he taps away on the keyboard and instantly my favourite word appears on the screen. What do you think it was?”

“Beer?” Persse ventured.

Frobisher looked at him a shade suspiciously through his owlish spectacles, and shook his head. “Try again.”

“I don’t know, I’m sure,” said Persse.

Frobisher paused to drink and swallow, then looked solemnly at Persse. “Grease,” he said, at length.

“Grease?” Persse repeated blankly.

“
Grease. Greasy. Greased
. Various forms and applications of the root, literal and metaphorical. I didn’t believe him at first, I laughed in his face. Then he pressed a button and the machine began listing all the phrases in my works in which the word grease appears in one form or another. There they were, streaming across the screen in front of me, faster than I could read them, with page references and line numbers.
The greasy floor, the roads greasy with rain, the grease-stained cuff, the greasy jam butty, his greasy smile, the grease-smeared table, the greasy small change of their conversation, even, would you believe it, his body moved in hers like a well-greased piston
. I was flabbergasted, I can tell you. My entire oeuvre seemed to be saturated in grease. I’d never realized I was so obsessed with the stuff. Dempsey was chortling with glee, pressing buttons to show what my other favourite words were. Grey and grime were high on the list, I seem to remember. I seemed to have a penchant for depressing words beginning with a hard ‘g’. Also
sink, smoke, feel, struggle, run and sensual
. ‘Then he started to refine the categories. The parts of the body I mentioned most often were hand and breast, usually one on the other. The direct speech of male characters was invariably introduced by the simple tag
he said
, but the speech of women by a variety of expressive verbal groups,
she gasped, she sighed, she whispered urgently, she cried passionately
. All my heroes have brown eyes, like me. Their favourite expletive is
bugger
.

The women they fall in love with tend to have Biblical names, especially ones beginning with ‘R’—_Ruth, Rachel, Rebecca_, and so on. I like to end chapters with a short moodless sentence.”

“You remember all this from six years ago?” Persse marvelled.

“Just in case I might forget, Robin Dempsey gave me a printout of the whole thing, popped it into a folder and gave it to me to take home. `A little souvenir of the day,’ he was pleased to call it. Well, I took it home, read it on the train, and the next morning, when I sat down at my desk and tried to get on with my novel, I found I couldn’t. Every time I wanted an adjective,
greasy
would spring into my mind. Every time I wrote
he said
, I would scratch it out and write
he groaned
or
he laughed
, but it didn’t seem right—but when I went back to
he said
, that didn’t seem right either, it seemed predictable and mechanical. Robin and Josh had really fucked me up between them. I’m never been able to write fiction since.”

He ended, and emptied his tankard in a single draught. “That’s the saddest story I ever heard,” said Persse.

The lights in the pub dimmed and brightened. “Time, ladies and gents!” called the barman.

“Come on,” said Frobisher. “I know a place where we can get a drink. In Soho.”

At Darlington’s Computer Centre, the strip-lighting burns late. The student users of the facility have gone home long ago, back to their digs and halls of residence, back to the distractions of the Union bar and the Union disco, leaving behind them the paper excreta of the day’s labours: punched data cards in various colours, swathes of printout, dogends, and crumpled paper cups. The air has a stale, slightly singed odour, as if the electronic machinery has burned up all its natural sweetness. There are only two men left in the building. One, sitting in a glass-partitioned booth, peels the polyfilm wrapping from a cheese sandwich and eats it, thoughtfully observing the other man, who is hunched over a console in a corner of the main room.

“NOBODY SEEMS TO LIKE ME,” Robin Dempsey types.

“WHAT MAKES YOU SAY THAT?” replies ELIZA.

“IN THE STAFF CANTEEN I WATCH MY COLLEAGUES COMING TOWARDS MY TABLE WITH THEIR TRAYS AND THEN VEERING AWAY WHEN THEY RECOGNIZE ME.”

“WHY DO YOU THINK THEY DO THAT?”