Fury Read online

  The question of Dubdub’s intellectual capacity remained, for many of his colleagues, unanswerable: the Dubdub Conundrum. He seemed so foolish so often—a nickname that never caught on, because it was too unkind even for Cambridge men, was Pooh, after the immortal Bear of Little Brain—yet his academic performance won him much preferment. The thesis on Voltaire that got him his doctorate and provided the launchpad for his later fame read like a defense of Panglossboth of that imaginary worthy’s initial Leibnizian over-optimism and of his later espousal of fenced-in quietism. This ran so profoundly counter to the dystopic, collectivist, politically engage current of the times in which he wrote it as to be, for Solanka as for others, quite seriously shocking. Dubdub gave an annual series of lectures called “Cultiver Son Jardin.”Few lectures at Cambridge—Pevsner’s, Leavis’s, no others had attracted comparable crowds. The young (or, to be exact, the younger, because Dubdub for all his fogeyish attire had by no means done with his youth) came to heckle and boo but left more quietly and thoughtfully, seduced by his deep sweetness of nature, by that same blue-eyed innocence and concomitant certainty of being heard that had roused Malik Solanka from his first-day funk.

  Times change. One morning in the mid-seventies, Solanka slipped in at the back of his friend’s lecture hall. What impressed him now was the toughness of what Dubdub was saying and the way in which his strongly contrasting, almost Pythonesque twittishness defused it. If you looked at him you saw a tweedy fop, hopelessly out of touch with what was then still being called the zeitgeist. But if you listened, you heard something very different: an enveloping Beckettian bleakness. “Expect nothing, don’t you know,” Dubdub told them, leftist radicals and beaded hairies alike, waving a crumbling copy of Candide. “That’s what the good book says. There will be no improvement in the way life is. Dreadful news, I know, but there you have it. This is as good as it gets. The perfectibility of man is just, as you might say, God’s bad joke.”

  Ten years earlier, when various utopias, marxist, hippyish, seemed just around the corner, when economic prosperity and full employment allowed the intelligent young to indulge their brilliant, idiotic fantasies of dropout or revolutionary Erewhons, he might have been lynched, or at least heckled into silence. But this was the England in the aftermath of the miners’ strike and the three-day week, a cracked England in the image of Lucky’s great soliloquy in Godot, in which man in brief was seen to shrink and dwindle, and that golden moment of optimism, when the best of all possible worlds seemed just around the bend, was fading fast. Dubdub’s Stoical take on Pangloss—rejoice in the world, warts and all, because it’s all you’ve got, and rejoicing and despair are therefore interchangeable terms—was rapidly coming into its own.

  Solanka himself was affected by it. As he struggled to formulate his thoughts on the perennial problem of authority and the individual, he sometimes heard Dubdub’s voice egging him on. These were statist times, and it was in part Waterford-Wajda who allowed him not to run with the crowd. The state couldn’t make you happy, Dubdub whispered in his ear, it couldn’t make you good or heal a broken heart. The state ran schools, but could it teach your children to love reading, or was that your job? There was a National Health Service, but what could it do about the high percentage of people who went to their doctors when they didn’t need to? There was state housing, sure, but neighborliness was not a government issue. Solanka’s first book; a small volume called What We Need, an account of the shifting attitudes in European history toward the state-vs.-individual problem, was attacked from both ends of the political spectrum and later described as one of the “pre/texts” of what came to be called Thatcherism. Professor Solanka, who loathed Margaret Thatcher, guiltily conceded the partial truth of what felt like an accusation. Thatcherite Conservatism was the counterculture gone wrong: it shared his generation’s mistrust of the institutions of power and used their language of opposition to destroy the old power-blocs to give the power not to the people, whatever that meant, but to a web of fat-cat cronies. This was trickle-up economics, and it was the sixties’ fault. Such reflections contributed greatly to Professor Solanka’s decision to quit the world of thought.

  By the late 1970s Krysztof Waterford-Wajda was a bit of a star. Academics had become charismatic. The victory of science, when physics would become the new metaphysics, and microbiology, not philosophy, would grapple with the great question of what it is to be human, was as yet a little way off; literary criticism was the glamour act, and its titans strode from continent to continent in seven-league boots to strut upon an ever larger international stage. Dubdub traveled the world with personal wind effects ruffling his tousled, prematurely silvery locks, even indoors, like Peter Sellers in The Magic Christian. Sometimes he was mistaken by eager delegates for the mighty Frenchman Jacques Derrida, but this honor he would wave away with an English self-deprecating smile, while his Polish eyebrows frowned at the insult.

  This was the period in which the two great industries of the future were being born. The industry of culture would in the coming decades replace that of ideology, becoming “primary” in the way that economics used to be, and spawn a whole new nomenklatura of cultural commissars, a new breed of apparatchiks engaged in great ministries of definition, exclusion, revision, and persecution, and a dialectic based on the new dualism of defense and offense. And if culture was the world’s new secularism, then its new religion was fame, and the industry—or, better, the church—of celebrity would give meaningful work to a new ecclesia, a proselytizing mission designed to conquer this new frontier, building its glitzy celluloid vehicles and its cathode-ray rockets, developing new fuels out of gossip, flying the Chosen Ones to the stars. And to fulfill the darker requirements of the new faith, there were occasional human sacrifices, and steep, wing-burning falls.

  Dubdub was an early Icarus-like flameout. Solanka saw little of him in his golden years. Life separates us with its apparently casual happenstance, and when one day we shake our heads as if waking from a reverie, our friends have become strangers and can’t be retrieved: “Does nobody here know poor Rip van Winkle?” we ask plaintively, and nobody, any longer, does. So it was with the two old college pals. Dubdub was mostly in America now, some sort of a chair had been invented for him at Princeton, and there were phone calls back and forth at first, then Christmas and birthday cards, then silence. Until, one balmy Cambridge summer evening in 1984, when the old place was its most perfectly storybook self, an American woman knocked on the oak, the outer door of Professor Solanka’s rooms—formerly occupied by E. M. Forster—on the staircase, above the students’ bar. Her name was Perry Pincus; she was small-boned, dark, big-breasted, sexy, young, but fortunately not young enough to be a student. All these things quickly made a good impression on Solanka’s melancholy consciousness. He was recovering from the end of a first, childless marriage, and Eleanor Masters was some way in the future. “Krysztof and I got to Cambridge yesterday,” Perry Pincus said. “We’re at the Garden House. Or, Ira at the Garden House. He’s in Addenbrooke’s. Last night he cut his wrists. He’s been very depressed. He asked for you. Can I get a drink?”

  She came in and took in her surroundings appreciatively. The houses, little and largeish, and the humanoid figures sitting everywhere, tiny figures in the houses, of course, but also others outside them, on Professor Solanka’s furniture, in the corners of his rooms, soft and hard figures, male and female, also both largeish and small. Perry Pincus was carefully—if heavily—painted, her eyelids weighed down by heavy black eyelash extensions, and she wore full sex-kitten battle dress, a short tight outfit, stiletto heels. Not the customary attire of a woman whose lover has just attempted suicide, but she made no excuses for herself. Perry Pincus was a young Eng Lit person who liked to fuck the stars of her increasingly uncloistered world. As a devotee of the casual encounter, consequences (wives, suicides) were not her thing. Yet she was bright, lively, and like all of us believed herself to be an acceptable person, even, perhaps, a good one. After her fir
st shot of vodka—Professor Solanka always kept a bottle in the freezer—she said, matter-of-factly, “It’s clinical depression. I don’t know what to do. He’s sweet, but I’m no good at sticking by men in trouble. I’m not the nurse type. I like a take-charge guy.” After two shots she said, “I think he was a virgin when he met me. Is that even possible? He didn’t admit it, of course. Said back home he was quite a catch. That turns out to be true, financially speaking, but I’m not the money-grubbing type.” After three shots she said, “All he ever wanted was to get a b.j. or, alternatively, fuck me in the ass. Which was okay, you know, whatever. I get a lot of that. It’s one of my looks: boy-with-tits. It gets the sexually confused guys. Trust me on this. I know.” After four shots, she said, “Talking of sexually confused, Professor, great dolls.”

  He decided he was hungry, but not this hungry, and gently coaxed her downstairs onto King’s Parade and into a taxi. She stared at him through the window with smudged eyes and a puzzled expression, then leaned back, closed her eyes, faintly shrugged. Whatever. Afterward he learned that in her own way Perry “Pinch-ass” was famous on the global literary circuit. You could be famous for anything nowadays, and she was.

  The next morning he visited Dubdub, not in the main hospital, but in a good-looking old brick building standing in green, leafy grounds a little way down Trumpington Road: like a country house for the hopeless. Dubdub stood at a window smoking a cigarette, wearing crisp, wide-striped pajamas under what looked like his old school dressing-gown, a worn, stained thing that was perhaps playing the part of a security blanket. His wrists were bandaged. He looked heavier, older, but that goddamn society smile was still there, still on parade. Professor Solanka thought that if his own genes had sentenced him to wear such a mask every day of his life, he’d have been in here with bandaged wrists long ago.

  “Dutch elm disease,” Dubdub said, pointing to the stumps of trees. “Frightful business. The elms of old England, lost and gone.” Lorst and gorn. Professor Solanka said nothing. He hadn’t come to talk about trees. Dubdub turned toward him, got the point. “Expect nothing and you won’t be disappointed, eh,” he murmured, looking boyishly shamefaced. “Should’ve listened to my own lectures.” Still Solanka didn’t answer. Then, for the first time in many years, Dubdub put aside the Old Etonian act. “It’s to do with suffering,” he said flatly. “Why do we all suffer so. Why is there so much of it. Why can’t you ever stop it. You can build dikes, but it always comes oozing through, and then one day the dikes just give way. And it’s not just me. I mean, it is me, but it’s everyone. It’s you, too. Why does it go on and on? It’s killing us. I mean, me. It’s killing me.”

  “This sounds a little abstract,” Professor Solanka ventured, gently. “Yes, well.” That was definitely a snap. The deflector shields were back in place. “Sorry not to come up to scratch. Trouble with being a Bear of Little Brain.”

  “Please,” Professor Solanka asked. “Just tell me.”

  “That’s the worst part,” Dubdub said. “There’s nothing to tell. No direct or proximate cause. You just wake up one day and you aren’t a part of your life. You know this. Your life doesn’t belong to you. Your body is not, I don’t know how to make you feel the force of this, yours. There’s just life, living itself. You don’t have it. You don’t have anything to do with it. That’s all. It doesn’t sound like much, but believe me. It’s like when you hypnotize someone and persuade them there’s a big pile of mattresses outside their window. They no longer see a reason not to jump.”

  “I remember it, or a lesser version of it,” Professor Solanka assented, thinking of that night in Market Hill long ago. “And you were the one who snapped me out of it. Now it’s for me to do the same for you.” The other shook his head. “This isn’t something you just snap out of, I’m afraid.” The attention he’d been getting, the celebrity status, had greatly aggravated Dubdub’s existential crisis. The more he became a Personality, the less like a person he felt. Finally he had decided on a retreat back into the cloisters of traditional academe. No more of all that globetrotting Magic Christian Derridada! No more performance. Energized by his new resolve, he had flown back to Cambridge with the literary groupie Perry Pincus, an unashamed sexual butterfly, actually believing he could set up house with her and build a stable life around the relationship. That’s how far gone he was.

  Krysztof Waterford-Wajda would survive three further suicide attempts. Then, just one month before Professor Solanka metaphorically took his own life, saying good-bye to everyone and everything he held dear and striking out for America with a spiky-haired doll in his arms a special, early-period limited edition of Little Brain in bad condition, the clothes ripped, the body damaged—Dubdub dropped dead. Three arteries had been badly clogged. A simple bypass operation could have saved him, but he refused it and, like an English elm, fell. Which perhaps, if one were searching for such explanations, helped trigger Professor Solanka’s metamorphosis. Professor Solanka, remembering his dead friend in New York, realized that he had followed Dubdub in so many things: in some of his thinking, yes, but also into le monde mediatigue, into America, into crisis.

  Perry Pincus had been one of the first to intuit the link between them. She had returned to her native San Diego and now taught, in a local college, the work of some of the critics and writers whom she had carnally known. Pincus 101, she called it, brazen as ever, in one of the annual Happy Holidays messages she never failed to send Professor Solanka. “It’s my personal greatest-hits collection, my Top Twenty,” she wrote, adding, a little cuttingly, “You’re not in it, Professor. I can’t walk around in a man’s work if I don’t know which entrance he prefers.” Her season’s greetings were invariably accompanied, incomprehensibly, by the gift of a soft toy—a platypus, a walrus, a polar bear. Eleanor had always been much amused by the annual parcels from California. “Because you wouldn’t fuck her,” Professor Solanka was informed by his wife, “she can’t think of you as a lover. So she’s trying to become your mother instead. How does it feel to be Perry Pinch-ass’s little boy?”

  3

  In his comfortable Upper West Side sublet, a handsome, high-ceilinged first- and second-floor duplex boasting majestic oak paneling and a library that spoke highly of the owners, Professor Malik Solanka nursed a glass of red Geyserville zinfandel and mourned. The decision to leave had been wholly his; still, he grieved for his old life. Whatever Eleanor said on the phone, the break was almost certainly irreparable. Solanka had never thought of himself as a bolter or quitter, yet he had shed more skins than a snake. Country, family, and not one wife but two had been left in his wake. Also, now, a child. Maybe the mistake was to see his latest exit as unusual. The harsh reality was perhaps that he was acting not against nature but according to its dictates. When he stood naked before the unvarnished mirror of truth, this was what he was really like.

  Yet, like Perry Pincus, he believed himself to be a good person. Women believed it too. Sensing in him a ferocity of commitment that was rarely found in modern men, women had often allowed themselves to fall in love with him, surprising themselves—these wised-up, cautious women!—by the speed with which they charged outward into the really deep emotional water. And he didn’t let them down. He was kind, understanding, generous, clever, funny, grown-up, and the sex was good, it was always good. This is forever, they thought, because they could see him thinking it too; they felt loved, treasured, safe. He told them—each of his women in turn—that friendship was what he had instead of family ties, and, more than friendship, love. That sounded right. So they dropped their defenses and relaxed into all the good stuff, and never saw the hidden twisting in him, the dreadful torque of his doubt, until the day he snapped and the alien burst out of his stomach, baring multiple rows of teeth. They never saw the end coming until it hit them. His first wife, Sara, the one with the graphic verbal gift, put it thus: “It felt like an ax-murder.”

  “Your trouble is,” Sara incandescently said near the end of their last quarrel,
“that you’re really only in love with those fucking dolls. The world in inanimate miniature is just about all you can handle. The world you can make, unmake, and manipulate, filled with women who don’t answer back, women you don’t have to fuck. Or are you making them with cunts now, wooden cunts, rubber cunts, fucking inflatable cunts that squeak like balloons as you slide in and out; do you have a life-size fuck-dolly harem hidden in a shed somewhere, is that what they’ll find when one day you’re arrested for raping and chopping up some golden-haired eight-year-old, some poor fucking living doll you played with and then threw away. They’ll find her shoe in a hedge and there’ll be descriptions of a minivan on TV and I’ll be watching and you won’t be home and I’ll think, Jesus, I know that van, it’s the one he carries his fucking toys around in when he goes to his perverts’ I’ll-show-you-my-dolly-if-you’ll-show-me-yours reunions. I’ll be the wife who never knew a thing. I’ll be the fucking cow-faced wife on TV forced to defend you just to defend myself, my own unimaginable stupidity, because after all, I chose you.”

  Life is fury, he’d thought. Fury-sexual, Oedipal, political, magical, brutal-drives us to our finest heights and coarsest depths. Out of furia comes creation, inspiration, originality, passion, but also violence, pain, pure unafraid destruction, the giving and receiving of blows from which we never recover. The Furies pursue us; Shiva dances his furious dance to create and also to destroy. But never mind about gods! Sara ranting at him represented the human spirit in its purest, least socialized form. This is what we are, what we civilize ourselves to disguise—the terrifying human animal in us, the exalted, transcendent, self-destructive, untrammeled lord of creation. We raise each other to the heights of joy. We tear each other limb from fucking limb.