Logotarditis
Patrick Skene Catling
Swallow D. M. Thomas (Gollancz £895) Mako [the US Secretary of State] strode around with increasing des- peration. He could see there was some- thing wrong with the President. His [Mako's] keen Princeton-trained mind has worked it out that the Tiger's [the Presi- dent's] slowing-down brain could only re- spond to the last question but one . . . There was even a term for it in the medical encylcopedia Mako had looked up: logo- tarditis. A senile condition . .
D. M. Thomas is still 20 years younger than his ludicrously senile 'President O'Reilly' and should not be too soft in the head to continue to turn out more in the `sequence of improvisational novels,' as he calls them. (Why not simply 'improvised'?) But perhaps he should look up, or make up, a word meaning 'sluggish, derivative comedy' and write it large as a warning beside whatever machine he does his im- provisationising on.
In Swallow, there is a large chunk of comedy reminiscent of Terry Southern's Dr Strangelove and Philip Roth's harsh Nixonian farce, Our Gang. Thomas is neither as funny nor as savage as his predecessors. There is a passage of dia- logue betweeen Victor Surkov, a Russian poet representing Pravda, and President O'Reilly, in which logotarditis brings the President's rational jargon responses into absurd juxtaposition with incompatible later questions and suggests insane bel- ligerence and lubricity. The joke is prot- racted and ponderous.
The President misinterprets an ambi- guous message on the two-way telescreen in the Oval Office. 'Soviets attack "Dal- las": confirmed' really means only that lzvestia has cited a soap opera as an example of 'capitalist trash' on American television. The President overreacts, and then, of course, so do the Russians. There is an exchange of ICBM's like nuclear custard-pies with a commentary in four- letter words.
`The quavery voice of General Vane filled the office . .' The defence chief is another senile victim of logotarditis.
' "Mr President, they're hitting Hous- ton, Boston, San Francisco and Detroit." "Hello, Vane. What a fuck-up."
"What do we strike, Mr President?"
"Shit! Detroit too? There goes our auto industry . . . and cousin Beth in Boston . . . What do we hit?"
"Hello, Mr President. What do we go for?" ' And so on.
This lack-lustre fantasy is presented as one of the highlights of the marathon performance of an Italian improvvisatrice at the improvisators' Olympiad, on the isle of Satakieli (Nightingale), in Finland. Her improvisatorial pseudonym is Corilla Riz- nich – Corilla after Corilla Olimpica, the name assumed by Maddalena Morelli, 'one of the greatest and most famous' impro- visators of the 18th century, who took it from Corinna, `the famous Theban im- provvisatrice, who five times defeated Pin- dar in public competition'. (In an author's note, Thomas expresses 'Warm thanks to Gay Clifford and Germaine Greer, for their help in obtaining information about the tradition of the improvvisatrici in Italy'.) Corilla Riznich and the other competi- tors improvise in prose and verse, on different given themes, before 12 interna- tional, learned judges and a large, not entirely sympathetic audience, in the open air, in the interminable sunlight of the northern midsummer.
The judges between them have English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Rus- sian, Polish, Hungarian, Hebrew, Japanese, Iranian and Portuguese. As none of them understands all those lan- guages, simultaneous translations in the first six can be heard over earphones.
The translators are extraordinarily talented: when a Russian improvises in verse it is immediately rendered into Eng- lish, complete with rhymes, which one of the judges, an Anglo-Argentinian, intem- perately praises. 'But what a powerful, moving poem!' he exclaims. 'It would not be disgraced if it were to appear in print . . I disagree. It is weak and unmoving, with rhymes such as 'blonde/yawned' hardly up to Olympic standards.
I feel more inclined to agree with the understandably 'sorrowful-looking' Pole who, at one of the judges' secret panel discussions, calls Corilla's improvisation `hysterical and pornographic. It sounded like the product of a man-hating nympho- maniac.' When Thomas is guilty of exces- ses he can blame his characters. A swallow, he says, is someone who flits promiscuous- ly from person to person. Corilla is a swallow. The title also announces the more active characters' orally fixated sexual orientation, as a sexologist might put it.
Thomas writes: 'The mysterious way in which a word, an image, a dream, a story, calls up another, connected yet indepen' dent, is one of the main themes of Swat' low.' He thus awards himself license to throw together in free association a lot of disparate elements on the slightest of pretexts. Fragments of his interestinglY revealing autobiography are intermingled with passages of H. Rider Haggard's King Solomon's Mines, 'scandalously amended', as Thomas himself rightly says. A (fiction- al) English poet plagiarises the autobiogra- phy. A (fictional) Russian poet, another figment of Corinna's inflamed imagination, has his beastly way with 'an incredibly fat Mongolian waitress' in a hotel bedroom while a blind woman sits in the room, obliviously eating an omelette. An echo of Nabokovian sadism? Thomas is evidentlY fascinated by echoes. The total effect is one of facetious self-indulgence, a waste of some good writing. After 312 pages of logotardals, how one longs for the blessed amnesia of Alzheimer's Disease!
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