‘Old Europe!’, I say to W. ‘We’ll never belong to it.’ We are passing through railway stations familiar to us from biographies of Kafka and novels by Sebald. ‘What is it, do you think? What’s wrong with us?’ W. is not sure, but he says it’s something we all share, the English. ‘The English disease’, he calls it.
‘The English’, I announce to W., ‘hate intellectuals.’ – ‘Oh yes, you’re an intellectual, are you?’ – ‘You see! You can’t even think of yourself as an intellectual. That’s because you’re English.’ – ‘I’m not English, I’m Canadian!’ – ‘You’re spiritually English, just as I’m spiritually English.’
I remind him of his photo album. Pictures of W., happy in Canada, with his family, who are likewise happy, and then pictures of W. in England. ‘The fall’, W. calls it. ‘The move,’ says W., ‘that’s when the disaster happened.’ His parents brought them back to England, to Wolverhampton. ‘Wolverhampton!’ says W., ‘can you imagine. Ah, what I might have been, had I stayed in Canada!’ He sighs.
Both of us dream of Canada. Academics are paid more there, and there’s more space. ‘That’s the problem with England,’ says W. ‘Overcrowding.’ But Canada is wide open. It’s the promised land. ‘Oh Can-a-da’ I sing, from Joni Mitchell. ‘If we made it to Canada, everything would be ok’, I tell W. ‘We’d breathe easier. We’d be unashamed intellectuals. We’d spread our wings. Imagine!’
W. is lost in a Canadian reverie. ‘We had a dog who was half-wolf, he says, ‘and she would follow me on my paper round, leading me by the arm. She took my hand in her mouth and led me, it was amazing. She never barked. And when we left, she starved herself to death, because she missed us so much. That’s loyalty.’
W. admires loyalty. In his paper on love, he called Sal, ‘small, blonde and fiercely loyal’. Someone asked whether she was a labrador. ‘You’re not loyal’, W. always insists. ‘You’d break the phalanx. You’d betray me – for a woman.’ He insists on this. When have I betrayed him in the past? ‘You will betray me,’ says W., ‘I’m certain of it.’
We speak about our friends from Canada. ‘They’re better than us,’ says W., and I agree. R. had told us he used to take his guitar round to his neighbours and they’d all sing together. ‘Do you think we would be singers, if we lived in Canada?’, I ask W. – ‘And dancers. Singers and dancers. Show me how you’d dance.’
I remind him of his Monkey Pirate Dance. ‘Ah yes!’, said W., ‘my high point!’ It was as a forfeit in a game of cards we made up at All Tomorrow’s Parties. I have pictures: W. with his trousers off, and Sal’s long tights pulled right up to his thighs, and an exuberant expression on his face, rolling from foot to foot, his arms bent. He sang a made up sea shanty: it was beautiful. ‘The Monkey Pirate Dance,’ says W., ‘how could I forget?’
‘We’d have grown up strong and true in Canada,’ I say to W. ‘We’d be men of the outdoors!’ – ‘Outdoors men! Exactly!’ W. used to apply for jobs in Canada. ‘There’s no point’, he laments. If only his family had stayed! But they came back. He was born over there, and they came back. ‘And that’s where it all started to go wrong,’ says W., ‘Wolverhampton! After Canada!’
‘Thank God I didn’t go to Oxford,’ says W., ‘that would have finished me. First Wolverhampton, then Oxford!’ He father said he couldn’t go to Oxford. ‘He was right!’ – ‘If you’d have gone to Oxford, it would have been too late.’ – ‘Canada,’ says W., ‘that’s where we should be. Things would be very different.’ – ‘But don’t you think it’s too late for us?’ – ‘It’s never too late,’ says W., except for you. You are, at heart, a betrayer. You will betray me for a woman.’
W. has seen Derrida dancing, he says. He does an impression. ‘The Derrida shuffle.’ It was on a balcony in Nice. ‘Everyone was dancing. Derrida was dancing, I was dancing …’ – ‘Do you think Levinas danced?’ – ‘Levinas was no dancer,’ says W. – ‘How about Nancy?’ – ‘Nancy was always too ill to dance.’ – ‘Heidegger played volleyball.’ – ‘Oh yes, Gadamer told me that.’ – ‘And Hegel, Schelling and Holderlin did a freedom dance around a tree.’ – ‘It was a freedom tree. There was no dancing.’
‘Come now,’ I say to W. later, ‘do you really think I’m a betrayer?’ – ‘Oh yes. You’re the type.’ – ‘Even if we moved to Canada?’ – ‘Oh yes. It’s a weakness in your soul. You’d betray me for a woman. You’d break the phalanx!’ – ‘What phalanx?’ – ‘The phalanx of our friendship,’ says W., grandly. Later, after coming in from the nightclub, we dance upstairs in W.’s lounge.
‘We’re non-dancers’, W. says. ‘But dancers admire non-dancers. They can’t dance like us.’ We remember dancing in Poland – your finest hour, W. says. I led Polish postgraduates in made up formation dances. ‘The Primal Scene!’; ‘The Return of the Repressed!’; ‘The Death Drive!’ – ‘It was beautiful’, W. remembers, ‘you’ll never have that many people following you again.’
‘Dance like a Canadian!’, I cry to W. in the upstairs lounge. He slides across the wooden floor in his socks and jumps onto the sofa. ‘Dance like an idiot!’, cries W. to me. I swing my arms like an ape. W. hums to the music loudly as he dances. ‘For dancers, we make good intellectuals,’ says W. – For intellectuals, we make good dancers!’, I say.
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