Deaf Sentence Read online

  ‘Who was that young woman you were deep in conversation with?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘You were deep in conversation with a young blonde.’

  ‘I didn’t see Ron. Was he there?’

  ‘Not Ron. The blonde woman you were talking to, who was she?’

  ‘Oh. I’ve no idea. She told me her name, twice in fact, but I couldn’t make it out. I didn’t hear a word she was saying. The noise . . .’

  ‘It’s all the concrete.’

  ‘There’s nothing wrong with the heating, in fact it’s always too bloody hot for my liking.’

  ‘No, concrete. The walls, the floor. It makes the sound reverberate.’

  ‘Oh . . .’

  (Pause.)

  ‘What did you think of the exhibition?’

  ‘I thought she might be one of your customers.’

  ‘Who?’

  ‘The young blonde woman.’

  ‘Oh. No, I’ve never seen her before. What did you think of the exhibition?’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The exhibition - what did you think?’

  ‘Drab, boring. Anyone with a digital camera could take those pictures.’

  ‘I thought they had a kind of interesting . . . sadness.’

  ‘Can badness be interesting?’

  ‘Sadness, an interesting sadness. Are you wearing your hearing aid, darling?’

  ‘Of course I am.’

  ‘It doesn’t seem to be working very well.’

  She was absolutely right. I tapped the earpiece in my right ear with my fingernail and got a dull dead sound. The battery had packed up and I hadn’t noticed. I don’t know at what point in the evening it happened. Maybe that was why I didn’t hear what the blonde woman was saying, though I don’t think so. I think it must have happened when I went to the Gents, which was after she left. It was quiet in there and I wouldn’t have registered the loss of volume, or I would have attributed it to the quietness of the Gents compared to the cacophony in the gallery, and when I went back to the party I didn’t even attempt to have a conversation with anybody but pretended to be interested in the pictures, which were in fact not at all interesting, for their sadness or badness or any other quality, but merely banal.

  ‘My battery’s packed up,’ I said. ‘Shall I put a new one in? It’s a bit tricky in the dark.’

  ‘No, don’t bother,’ Fred said, as she often does these days. She’ll come into my study, for instance, when I’m working on the computer, without wearing my hearing aid because it turns the soothing mutter of the keyboard into an intrusive clatter as loud as an old-fashioned upright Remington, and she’ll say something to me which I don’t hear, and I have to make a split second choice between either halting the conversation while I scrabble for my hearing aid pouch and insert the earpieces or trying to wing it without them, and usually I try to wing it, and a dialogue follows something like:

  Fred: Murr murr murr.

  Me: What?

  Fred: Murr murr murr.

  Me: (playing for time) Uh huh.

  Fred: Murr murr murr.

  Me: (making a guess at the content of the message) All right.

  Fred: (surprised) What?

  Me: What did you say?

  Fred: Why did you say ‘All right’ if you didn’t hear what I said?

  Me: Let me get my hearing aid.

  Fred: No, don’t bother. It’s not important.

  We drove the rest of the way home in silence. I went to my study to put a new battery in my right earpiece, or ‘hearing instrument’ as the User’s Guide rather grandiloquently calls it. I get through an amazing number of batteries because I frequently forget to switch off the hearing instruments when I put them away in their little zipped and foam-lined pouch, and then, unless Fred should happen to hear them making the high-pitched feedback noise they emit when thus enclosed and draws my attention to it, the batteries run down uselessly. This quite often happens at night if I take them out in my study or in the bathroom before going to bed and leave them there where Fred can’t hear them whining to themselves like mosquitoes. It happens so often in fact, even after I have made a special effort to do the opposite, that I sometimes think there is some kind of hearing-aid imp who switches them on in the night after I have switched them off. I simply can’t believe it when I open the pouch in the morning and find them switched on when I have such a clear memory of switching them off. There must be a kink in my neural pathways which makes me unconsciously switch them on again after consciously switching them off, a reflex motion of the thumb which slides the battery covers into the ‘On’ position even as I place them in their little nests of synthetic foam to sleep. The Bates Reflex, named after Desmond Bates, who established early in the twenty-first century that users develop an unconscious hostility towards their hearing aids which causes them to ‘punish’ these devices by carelessly allowing the batteries to run down. Actually it’s self-punishment because the batteries are quite expensive, nearly four pounds for six. They come in a little round transparent plastic pack with six compartments, ingeniously mounted on a cardboard base like a carousel, which you rotate to expel a new battery through a hinged flap at the back. Each battery has a brown plastic tab adhering to it which stops the electricity leaking away, or so I understand, and which you must remove before inserting the battery into your hearing instrument. These sticky little wafers are quite difficult to detach from your fingers and dispose of. I tend to transfer them on to whatever surface is to hand, so my desktop, files, ringbinders and other home office utensils are covered with tiny brown spots, as if soiled with the droppings of some incontinent nocturnal rodent. The instructions on the back of the pack tell you to wait at least one minute after removing the plastic tab before inserting the battery into the hearing instrument (don’t ask me why) but it often takes me longer than that to liberate myself from the tab.

  When I had replaced the battery I went into the drawing room, but Fred had gone upstairs to read in bed. I knew that was what she was doing even though she hadn’t said so, in the way married couples know each other’s habitual intentions without needing to be informed, which is particularly useful if you happen to be deaf; in fact if she had informed me verbally of her intention I would have been more likely to get it wrong. I didn’t want to join her because I can’t read in bed for more than five minutes without falling asleep, and it was too early for that, I would only wake up in the small hours and lie there tossing and turning, not wanting to get up in the cold dark but unable to drop off again.

  I thought about watching the News at Ten but the news is so depressing these days - bombings, murders, atrocities, famines, epidemics, global warming - that one shrinks from it late at night; let it wait, you feel, till the next day’s newspaper and the cooler medium of print. So I came back into the study and checked my email - ‘No New Messages’; and then I decided to write an account of my conversation, or rather non-conversation, with the woman at the ARC private view, which in retrospect seemed rather amusing, though stressful at the time. First I did it in the usual journal style, then I rewrote it in the third person, present tense, the kind of exercise I used to give students in my stylistics seminar. First person into third person, past tense into present tense, or vice versa.What difference does it make to the effect? Is one method more appropriate to the original experience than another, or does any method interpret rather than represent experience? Discuss.

  In speech the options are more limited - though my step-grandson Daniel, Marcia’s child, hasn’t learned this yet. He’s two years old, two and a half, and has quite a good vocabulary for his age, but he always refers to himself declaratively in the third person, present tense. When you say it’s time for bed, he says, ‘Daniel isn’t tired.’ When you say, ‘Give Grandad a kiss,’ he says, ‘Daniel doesn’t kiss granddads.’ Pronouns are tricky for kids, of course, because they’re shifters, as we say in the trade, their meaning depends entirely on who is using them: ‘you’ means you when I say it, b
ut me when you say it. So mastery of pronouns always comes fairly late in the child’s acquisition of language, but Daniel’s exclusive use of the third person at his age is rather unusual. Marcia is anxious about it and asked me if I thought it was possibly a symptom of something, autism for instance. I asked her if she referred to herself in the third person when speaking to Daniel, like ‘Mummy is tired’, or ‘Mummy has got to make the dinner’, and she admitted that she did occasionally. ‘You mean, it’s my fault?’ she said, a little resentfully. ‘I mean he’s imitating you,’ I said. ‘It’s quite common. But he’ll soon grow out of it.’ I told her that Daniel’s sentences were remarkably well-formed for his age, and that I was sure he would soon learn to use pronouns. I actually find it charming, the way he says, ‘Daniel is thirsty,’ ‘Daniel doesn’t tidy up,’ ‘Daniel is shy today,’ with a perceptible pause for thought before he speaks. It has an almost regal gravity and formality, as if he were a little prince or dauphin. Dauphin Daniel I call him. But young parents, educated middle-class ones anyway, are very jumpy these days, they get so much information from the media about all the things that could be wrong with their child - autism, dyslexia, attention deficit disorder, allergies, obesity and so on - they’re in a constant state of panic, watching their offspring like hawks for warning signs. And it’s catching: I’m far more anxious about the baby Anne is expecting than I was about any of Maisie’s pregnancies. Thirty-seven is late to give birth for the first time.

  2

  1st November, 2006. I rather enjoyed writing that piece last night, and re-reading it this morning. As aural-oral communication becomes more and more difficult, the total control one has over written discourse becomes more and more appealing, especially when the subject is deafness. So I’ll go on for a bit.

  I first discovered I was going deaf about twenty years ago. For some time before that I’d been aware that I was finding it increasingly difficult to hear what my students were saying, especially in seminars, with anything from twelve to twenty of them sitting round a long table. I thought it was because they mumbled - which indeed many of them do, being shy, or nervous, or unwilling to seem assertive in front of their peers - but it hadn’t been a problem when I was younger. I wondered if perhaps my ears were blocked with wax, so went to my GP. He peered into my ears with a chilly steel optical instrument and said there was no build-up of wax, so I’d better have my hearing checked at the Ear, Nose and Throat department of the University Hospital.

  They did an audiogram: you wear a pair of headphones and hold a press-button thingy which you squeeze when you hear a sound. The audiologist is using his apparatus out of your sight, so you can’t cheat, not that there would be any point in cheating. The sounds are not words, or even phonemes, just little beeps, which get fainter and fainter, or higher and higher, until you can’t hear them, like the cries of a bird spiralling up into the sky. Philip Larkin first discovered he was going deaf when he was walking in the Shetlands with Monica Jones and she remarked how beautiful the larks sounded singing overhead, and he stopped and listened but he couldn’t hear them. Rather poignant, a poet finding out he’s deaf in that way, especially when you think of Shelley’s ‘Ode to a Skylark’, ‘Hail to thee, blithe Spirit!’ one of the poems everybody learns by heart at school, or did before educational theory turned against memorising verse. A poet called Larkin, too - it’s almost funny in a black way, deafness and comedy going hand in hand, as always.

  Deafness is comic, as blindness is tragic.Take Oedipus, for instance: suppose, instead of putting out his eyes, he had punctured his eardrums. It would have been more logical actually, since it was through his ears that he learned the dreadful truth about his past, but it wouldn’t have the same cathartic effect. It might arouse pity, perhaps, but not terror. Or Milton’s Samson: ‘O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon, / Irrecoverably dark, without all hope of day.’ What a heartbreaking cry of despair! ‘O deaf, deaf, deaf . . .’ doesn’t have the same pathos somehow. How would it go on? ‘O deaf, deaf, deaf, amid the noise of noon, / Irrecoverably deaf, without all hope of sound.’ No.

  Of course, you could argue that blindness is a greater affliction than deafness. If I had to choose between them, I’d go for deafness, I admit. But they don’t differ only in degrees of sensory deprivation. Culturally, symbolically, they’re antithetical.Tragic versus comic. Poetic versus prosaic. Sublime versus ridiculous. One of the strongest curses in the English language is ‘Damn your eyes!’ (much stronger than ‘Fuck you!’ and infinitely more satisfying - try it next time some lout in a white van nearly runs you over). ‘Damn your ears!’ doesn’t cut it. Or imagine if the poet had written ‘Drink to me only with thine ears . . .’ It’s actually no more illogical than saying drink with thine eyes. Both metaphors are equally impossible concepts, in fact an ear is more like a cup than an eye, and you could conceivably drink, or at least slurp, out of an ear, though not your own of course . . . But poetical it isn’t. Nor would ‘Smoke gets in your ears’ be a very catchy refrain for a song. If smoke gets in your eyes when a lovely flame dies it must get in your ears too, but you don’t notice and it doesn’t make you cry. ‘There’s more in this than meets the ear’ is something Inspector Clouseau might say, not Poirot.

  The blind have pathos. Sighted people regard them with compassion, go out of their way to help them, guide them across busy roads, warn them of obstacles, stroke their guide dogs. The dogs, the white sticks, the dark glasses, are visible signs of their affliction, calling forth an instant rush of sympathy. We deafies have no such compassion-inducing warning signs. Our hearing aids are almost invisible and we have no loveable animals dedicated to looking after us. (What would be the equivalent of a guide dog for the deaf? A parrot on your shoulder squawking into your ear?) Strangers don’t realise you’re deaf until they’ve been trying and failing to communicate with you for some time, and then it’s with irritation rather than compassion.‘Thou shalt not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling-block before the blind,’ says the Bible (Leviticus, 19.14). Well, only a sadist would deliberately trip up a blind person, but even Fred lets out the occasional ‘Bloody hell!’ when she can’t get through to me. Prophets and seers are sometimes blind - Tiresias for instance - but never deaf. Imagine putting your question to the Sybil and getting an irritable ‘What? What?’ in reply.

  It’s a very unequal contest between the two organs. Eyes are the windows of the soul, they express feelings, they come in subtle, alluring colours and shades, they brim with tears, they shine and gleam and twinkle. Ears, well they’re funny-looking things really, especially when they stick out, all skin and gristle, secreting wax, sprouting hair, no wonder women hang earrings on the lobes, men too of course in certain societies and periods, to distract the eye from the furry hole that leads to your brain. In fact what other function does the ear lobe have? Perhaps that’s how it evolved, this otherwise useless flap of boneless tissue: prehistoric people with enough flesh on the lower rim of the ear to accommodate earrings had an advantage in the mating process, so got selected. But it would have been no advantage if the ears hadn’t served their primary purpose.

  Of all old women hard of hearing

  The deafest, sure was Dame Eleanor Spearing!

  On her head, it is true

  Two flaps there grew

  That served for a pair of gold rings to go through,

  But for any purpose of ears in a parley,

  They heard no more than ears of barley.

  Thomas Hood, ‘The Tale of a Trumpet’. Not quite in Larkin’s class - but Larkin never wrote a poem about being deaf, as far as I remember. Perhaps he found it too depressing to contemplate, though he wrote about a lot of other depressing things. I just looked up the anecdote about the larks in Andrew Motion’s biography. It happened in 1959, so Larkin would have been only thirty-seven. Motion says: ‘As his hearing grew weaker in the years ahead he felt more and more isolated, trapped in an incompetent body, foolish and pathetic . . . His deafness steadily darkened his
melancholy.’ Yes, we know, we know. I was a bit older than him when I found out, in my mid-forties, but with more years ahead of me to feel foolish and pathetic in.

  After my test I saw the ENT consultant, Mr Hopwood, a stout, moustached, bald-headed man with a slightly harassed manner, conscious no doubt of the long queue of patients sitting on moulded plastic chairs in the corridor outside. It was a hot day and he had taken off the jacket of his dark-blue pinstripe suit and was sitting in his waistcoat behind a cluttered desk. He showed me the charts the audiologist had made on graph paper, one for each ear. They looked a bit like diagrams of constellations, with straight lines joining the beeps, represented by crosses. The pattern was pretty much the same for both ears. Hopwood told me I had high-frequency deafness, the most common form of what they call ‘acquired deafness’ (as distinct from the congenital kind), caused by accelerated loss of the hair cells in the inner ear which convert sound waves into messages to the brain. Apparently everybody starts losing these cells from the moment they are born, but we have more than we need, some 17,000 in each ear, and it’s only when we’ve lost about thirty per cent of them that it begins to affect our hearing, which happens to most people when they’re about sixty, but to others, like Philip Larkin and me, much earlier.

  This can be due to a variety of causes. The most common is trauma: exposure to excessive noise - gunfire, for instance. Lots of soldiers in the artillery suffer from high-frequency deafness in later life, especially if they were careless about wearing ear-protectors; likewise workers in very noisy industrial environments. Neither of these occupational hazards applied to me. I avoided National Service by deferring it till I’d finished my PhD, by which time it had come to an end, and I never worked in a factory. When I was attending a conference in San Francisco in the late Sixties I went to a rock concert at Fillmore West, just out of curiosity (modern jazz was my kind of syncopated music, Brubeck, the MJQ, Chico Hamilton, Miles Davis) because another chap at the conference told me it was a famous venue and he was going, so I went with him. I don’t remember the name of the group, but their amplification was so loud it was actually painful. I moved back further and further in the hall and after about half an hour I walked out, I couldn’t stand it any longer, and my ears buzzed for the rest of the evening. I asked Hopwood if that could have done the damage and he said he thought it was very unlikely from a single exposure, though regular clubbers and rock concert-goers were at risk from excessively loud music. So it may be a genetic weakness, though I’m not aware of any family history of premature deafness. Dad is nearly as deaf as me, but at eighty-nine he’s entitled to be.When he was my age I don’t remember it being a problem. In fact he went on working well into his seven-ties, the odd Saturday night gig in old-fashioned social clubs that still went in for ballroom dancing to a live band of elderly musicians, while the rest of the world was twisting and raving in discotheques. Though, come to think of it, being a bit deaf wasn’t much of a handicap for playing in those bands - maybe it was even an advantage.