Miss-Delectable
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Living under a deaf sentence - Times Online
People discover – or reluctantly admit – that they are going deaf in different ways and in various circumstances. The realisation came to Philip Larkin with punning poignancy when he was walking in the Shetlands with his girlfriend Monica Jones and could not hear the larks she remarked on, singing overhead. He was only 37.
It happened to Alan Bennett more typically in his late sixties, at his summer retreat in the south of France, as recorded in his diary: “R asks me if I can hear the crickets and cannot believe that, the night tingling with the sound, I am dead to it. I can catch the bark of a distant dog, a car on the road to Nérac and the dishwasher still going in the kitchen. But crickets, no.”
My own awareness of having a hearing problem was more gradual. I was in my late forties, teaching full-time in the English department at Birmingham University and finding it more and more difficult to hear what students were saying in tutorials and seminars. At first I blamed the students for mumbling and murmuring – which many do, of course, out of diffidence or fear of seeming overassertive to their peers – but I had coped well enough in the past.
I was conscious also that I was talking too much myself in class because it was less of a strain than trying to make out what they were saying. So I went to my GP hoping that the problem was a build-up of wax in the ears, but it wasn’t. He referred me to an ear, nose and throat consultant who, after I had an audiogram, diagnosed high-frequency deafness – possibly caused by ear infections I had suffered in infancy.
My impairment was relatively mild, but the specialist warned me that it would gradually get worse and there was no cure.
It is estimated that about 9m people in the UK – one in seven of the population – are deaf or suffer from hearing loss. High-frequency deafness is by far the most common form of hearing impairment and is caused by loss of – or damage to – the thousands of tiny hair cells in the inner ear that amplify and convert sounds so that they can be transmitted to the brain. Consonants are pitched at a higher frequency than vowels and it is on consonants that we crucially depend to recognise words and distinguish between them.
A gradual deterioration of our hearing ability is almost inevitable as we grow older, but some of us experience it much earlier or more drastically than others. This can be due to a number of causes, sometimes in combination, such as genetic inheritance, viral illness, head injury, side effects of certain drugs and hair cell trauma. Unprotected exposure to excessive noise early in life – such as artillery fire or nightclubbing – will accelerate the natural loss of hair cells and may lead to serious deafness later.
For me the only remedy was to get a hearing aid. I started with a single, rather clumsy National Health Service behind-the-ear device and graduated in stages, as my hearing deteriorated and the technology improved, to a pair of digitalised “hearing instruments” that fit in each ear and adjust themselves automatically to the sound environment. Although the NHS now supplies this type of aid, the most sophisticated devices are only available privately and each earpiece can cost between £1,000 and £2,000.
They work – up to a point. I certainly would not be able to function either socially or professionally without mine. Even in the quiet of my own home I am not confident of hearing what my wife Mary is saying unless I am wearing them.
They cannot replace the perfectly balanced and amazingly flexible power of natural hearing, however, and they create their own problems and irritations. They get bunged up with wax and their batteries give out at inconvenient moments. Being so small, they are easily mislaid or lost – I once dropped one under the seat of my car and it rolled through a tiny hole into the chassis, requiring the removal of the entire seat assembly to recover it.
It is not particularly comfortable to have two bits of plastic wedged in your ears all day and it is tempting to take them out when you are alone. But by some deafies’ sod’s law, I always seem to do this just before Mary comes into the room and wants to speak to me, and I have to scrabble to put them in again, or try to wing it without them, at the risk of getting into some mutually irritating misunderstanding.
Outside the home, deafness makes communication even more hazardous. Modern hearing aids can damp down background noise to a degree, but if speech in the foreground is to be audible, users must put up with an amplification of the background noise. In situations where there is a lot of this – a busy restaurant or crowded party – I find it difficult and sometimes impossible to hear what people are saying even face to face from a few feet away.
This can be embarrassing. You make responses to your interlocutor’s words, nodding and murmuring “Yes . . . mmm . . . I see”, hoping that soon you will recognise a word or phrase that will give you a clue to the topic so you can make a contribution of your own. But the longer this goes on, the more likely it becomes that you will make some quite inappropriate response and be found out and the more difficult to confess that you have not understood a word.
I once sat with a former nun for an hour in a noisy Dublin pub while she told me, I suspect, the story of her life, having to rely entirely on her facial expressions and body language to react appropriately.
It’s also very awkward if you have a sense, but are not quite sure, that the other party is flattering you – praising your work, for instance: to thank them for a nonexistent compliment would make you look foolish, but to respond to some assurance that you are their favourite living novelist with a casual “Uh-huh” would seem ungracious, to say the least.
Regional and foreign accents increase the difficulty of communication. Since deafies miss consonants, we rely on recognisable vowel sounds to hazard a guess at a half-heard word, but if the speaker’s vowel system is unfamiliar as well we are lost.
Consulting call centres can be a nightmare for this reason. I remember phoning BT with a broadband inquiry and being answered by a young lady with a charming but impenetrable Ulster accent. I tactfully terminated the call and rang back later, hoping for better luck, only to be answered by another young lady with the same baffling accent. When the same thing happened a third time it dawned on me that the call centre was based in Northern Ireland.
I have missed trains through taking down departure times from a call centre in the Indian subcontinent. Now I use e-mail and the internet for such purposes, but the telephone cannot be dispensed with entirely.
Embarrassment, anxiety and frustration – these are the dominant psychological effects of deafness. Our noncomprehension makes us feel insecure. Our mistakes make us feel foolish.
We are the butts of innumerable jokes but we are always missing them – any kind of joke – in conversation or in the theatre, because they are unpredictable, often turning on the placing of a single unexpected word that we fail to catch. It is possible to sit through a play or film comprehending every line except the ones that make everybody else roar with laughter.
Here’s an old deaf joke: first man: “Is it Wednesday?” Second man: “No, it’s Thursday.” Third man (who is deaf): “So am I. Let’s go for a drink.”
Every deaf person can confess to ludicrous mishearings: “I bought a new wax-free polish” heard as “I bought a new laxative porridge”, for instance, or “She has a nice slim figure” as “She has a nice slim vicar”. Context can help to avoid such misinterpretation, but not infallibly.
One morning Mary appeared to say to me, as if it were important: “I have a knee in three minutes.” She has some arthritis in one knee joint, so my brain focused on this word and tried to make sense of the collocation “in three minutes”.
“What?” I said. (Deafies say “What?” a lot, buying time to think.) “I have a knee in three minutes,” she repeated, more loudly and deliberately. I looked blank and she looked impatient. I thought about this puzzling statement for a while until I found a more plausible one that suited a different context. “You have to leave in three minutes?” She sighed and nodded.
The frustration caused by deafness is shared by those who have to live with the deafened person. Understandably they tend to raise their voices when repeating a message but, by a cruel auditory twist, loud noises remain loud to those with high-frequency deafness. Meanwhile, quiet sounds become inaudible – hence the frequent complaint of the deafened addressee: “There’s no need to shout.”
Hearing loss is not good for the spirit or conducive to sweetness and light in the home. Irritated with yourself, you become irritable with others, then withdrawn. You tend to give up the effort to keep track of a half-heard conversation and fall into a private reverie. Deafness can cause or exacerbate depression to which, like many writers, I am temperamentally prone anyway.
You might think that of all the professions a novelist is least affected by hearing loss and, up to a point, that is true. We compose books in silence, consumed in silence by solitary readers.
However, deafness restricts and thins out the supply of new ideas and experience on which the novelist depends to create his fictions. That former nun’s life story might have been priceless “material” and I regret its loss. I miss opportunities to eavesdrop on humanly revealing conversations on buses and in shops and to keep up with new idioms, coinages and catch-phrases that give flavour and authenticity to dialogue in a novel of contemporary life.
These days the novelist’s work does not finish when he dispatches his typescript to agent or publisher. He is expected to participate in the marketing of the finished book by submitting to interviews and taking part in meet-the-author events and book signings. It is in our own interests to do so; but for the hearing-impaired writer these occasions acquire an additional element of stress. Live broadcasting on radio or television is the most challenging, particularly if it involves group discussion, and I usually decline to do such programmes because of the risk of drying up or perpetrating some howler.
In France, which is my most important market after Britain, these media ordeals are especially stressful because, being incompetent in spoken French, I have to cope with simultaneous translation, struggling to combine the studio’s headphones or earpieces with my own hearing aids – French coming into one ear and the English translation, lagging slightly behind, coming into the other.
On a recent occasion, the presenter of a live radio round-table discussion in Paris began with a long spiel that I presumed was irrelevant to me because my simultaneous interpreter was silent, so I didn’t pay much attention. Then it dawned on me with horror that it was actually addressed to me and would conclude with a question, as it then did. “I’m sorry,” I had to answer, “I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything you said.” Someone had left a cable unplugged. The listeners must have been puzzled.
Is there anything to be said in favour of going deaf? Well, it’s a cast-iron excuse for declining to serve on committees and driving without hearing aids makes your car seem as luxuriously silent as a Rolls-Royce. I can’t think of any other advantages for the average sufferer, although there have been some whom it pushed in a productive direction.
Colin Dexter, for instance, gave up teaching and turned to writing the enormously popular Inspector Morse mysteries because he was tired of pupils mocking his deafness.
Goya was a merely competent, conventional painter until he contracted a mysterious illness in his mid-forties from which he emerged stone-deaf. All his most original work postdates that crisis so there must have been a connection. Whether Goya perceived his deafness as a blessing in disguise, I rather doubt.
Beethoven gave up his promising career as a musician and conductor to concentrate on composing when he realised he was going deaf at the age of 28, so perhaps without that affliction he would not have written so much great music; but he was never able to hear it properly himself and his condition was a constant source of anxiety, misery and regret to him.
Still, there has never been a better time in human history than now to be deaf. Recent advances in electronics, computer science and medicine have combined to make a whole range of remedial and enabling devices available to the deaf and hearing-impaired, from miniaturised hearing aids and loop systems to surgical implants and vibrotactile aids (not a sex toy, but a device for alerting the profoundly deaf person to the presence and source of sound).
Subtitles on television are a godsend (they display the words of rock songs that even people with normal hearing can’t make out) and many cinemas show English language films with subtitles, admittedly at rather antisocial times. A more recent development is the captioning of occasional theatrical performances by means of an electronic screen positioned in front of the stage.
A friend of mine with a deaf daughter, now in her forties, remembers her as a child having to sit squinting in a dark theatre at a copy of Shakespeare’s text in order to follow the play. It is an image that epitomises for me both the deprivation caused by deafness and the impressive efforts of many to overcome it; but it also serves to measure the improved facilities available for the deaf and deafened today.
Much as I appreciate them I still grieve for my loss of hearing. Being a writer, I have found some relief in writing a novel about it. But I won’t be having a launch party.
— David Lodge’s new novel, Deaf Sentence, will be published by Harvill Secker on May 1
People discover – or reluctantly admit – that they are going deaf in different ways and in various circumstances. The realisation came to Philip Larkin with punning poignancy when he was walking in the Shetlands with his girlfriend Monica Jones and could not hear the larks she remarked on, singing overhead. He was only 37.
It happened to Alan Bennett more typically in his late sixties, at his summer retreat in the south of France, as recorded in his diary: “R asks me if I can hear the crickets and cannot believe that, the night tingling with the sound, I am dead to it. I can catch the bark of a distant dog, a car on the road to Nérac and the dishwasher still going in the kitchen. But crickets, no.”
My own awareness of having a hearing problem was more gradual. I was in my late forties, teaching full-time in the English department at Birmingham University and finding it more and more difficult to hear what students were saying in tutorials and seminars. At first I blamed the students for mumbling and murmuring – which many do, of course, out of diffidence or fear of seeming overassertive to their peers – but I had coped well enough in the past.
I was conscious also that I was talking too much myself in class because it was less of a strain than trying to make out what they were saying. So I went to my GP hoping that the problem was a build-up of wax in the ears, but it wasn’t. He referred me to an ear, nose and throat consultant who, after I had an audiogram, diagnosed high-frequency deafness – possibly caused by ear infections I had suffered in infancy.
My impairment was relatively mild, but the specialist warned me that it would gradually get worse and there was no cure.
It is estimated that about 9m people in the UK – one in seven of the population – are deaf or suffer from hearing loss. High-frequency deafness is by far the most common form of hearing impairment and is caused by loss of – or damage to – the thousands of tiny hair cells in the inner ear that amplify and convert sounds so that they can be transmitted to the brain. Consonants are pitched at a higher frequency than vowels and it is on consonants that we crucially depend to recognise words and distinguish between them.
A gradual deterioration of our hearing ability is almost inevitable as we grow older, but some of us experience it much earlier or more drastically than others. This can be due to a number of causes, sometimes in combination, such as genetic inheritance, viral illness, head injury, side effects of certain drugs and hair cell trauma. Unprotected exposure to excessive noise early in life – such as artillery fire or nightclubbing – will accelerate the natural loss of hair cells and may lead to serious deafness later.
For me the only remedy was to get a hearing aid. I started with a single, rather clumsy National Health Service behind-the-ear device and graduated in stages, as my hearing deteriorated and the technology improved, to a pair of digitalised “hearing instruments” that fit in each ear and adjust themselves automatically to the sound environment. Although the NHS now supplies this type of aid, the most sophisticated devices are only available privately and each earpiece can cost between £1,000 and £2,000.
They work – up to a point. I certainly would not be able to function either socially or professionally without mine. Even in the quiet of my own home I am not confident of hearing what my wife Mary is saying unless I am wearing them.
They cannot replace the perfectly balanced and amazingly flexible power of natural hearing, however, and they create their own problems and irritations. They get bunged up with wax and their batteries give out at inconvenient moments. Being so small, they are easily mislaid or lost – I once dropped one under the seat of my car and it rolled through a tiny hole into the chassis, requiring the removal of the entire seat assembly to recover it.
It is not particularly comfortable to have two bits of plastic wedged in your ears all day and it is tempting to take them out when you are alone. But by some deafies’ sod’s law, I always seem to do this just before Mary comes into the room and wants to speak to me, and I have to scrabble to put them in again, or try to wing it without them, at the risk of getting into some mutually irritating misunderstanding.
Outside the home, deafness makes communication even more hazardous. Modern hearing aids can damp down background noise to a degree, but if speech in the foreground is to be audible, users must put up with an amplification of the background noise. In situations where there is a lot of this – a busy restaurant or crowded party – I find it difficult and sometimes impossible to hear what people are saying even face to face from a few feet away.
This can be embarrassing. You make responses to your interlocutor’s words, nodding and murmuring “Yes . . . mmm . . . I see”, hoping that soon you will recognise a word or phrase that will give you a clue to the topic so you can make a contribution of your own. But the longer this goes on, the more likely it becomes that you will make some quite inappropriate response and be found out and the more difficult to confess that you have not understood a word.
I once sat with a former nun for an hour in a noisy Dublin pub while she told me, I suspect, the story of her life, having to rely entirely on her facial expressions and body language to react appropriately.
It’s also very awkward if you have a sense, but are not quite sure, that the other party is flattering you – praising your work, for instance: to thank them for a nonexistent compliment would make you look foolish, but to respond to some assurance that you are their favourite living novelist with a casual “Uh-huh” would seem ungracious, to say the least.
Regional and foreign accents increase the difficulty of communication. Since deafies miss consonants, we rely on recognisable vowel sounds to hazard a guess at a half-heard word, but if the speaker’s vowel system is unfamiliar as well we are lost.
Consulting call centres can be a nightmare for this reason. I remember phoning BT with a broadband inquiry and being answered by a young lady with a charming but impenetrable Ulster accent. I tactfully terminated the call and rang back later, hoping for better luck, only to be answered by another young lady with the same baffling accent. When the same thing happened a third time it dawned on me that the call centre was based in Northern Ireland.
I have missed trains through taking down departure times from a call centre in the Indian subcontinent. Now I use e-mail and the internet for such purposes, but the telephone cannot be dispensed with entirely.
Embarrassment, anxiety and frustration – these are the dominant psychological effects of deafness. Our noncomprehension makes us feel insecure. Our mistakes make us feel foolish.
We are the butts of innumerable jokes but we are always missing them – any kind of joke – in conversation or in the theatre, because they are unpredictable, often turning on the placing of a single unexpected word that we fail to catch. It is possible to sit through a play or film comprehending every line except the ones that make everybody else roar with laughter.
Here’s an old deaf joke: first man: “Is it Wednesday?” Second man: “No, it’s Thursday.” Third man (who is deaf): “So am I. Let’s go for a drink.”
Every deaf person can confess to ludicrous mishearings: “I bought a new wax-free polish” heard as “I bought a new laxative porridge”, for instance, or “She has a nice slim figure” as “She has a nice slim vicar”. Context can help to avoid such misinterpretation, but not infallibly.
One morning Mary appeared to say to me, as if it were important: “I have a knee in three minutes.” She has some arthritis in one knee joint, so my brain focused on this word and tried to make sense of the collocation “in three minutes”.
“What?” I said. (Deafies say “What?” a lot, buying time to think.) “I have a knee in three minutes,” she repeated, more loudly and deliberately. I looked blank and she looked impatient. I thought about this puzzling statement for a while until I found a more plausible one that suited a different context. “You have to leave in three minutes?” She sighed and nodded.
The frustration caused by deafness is shared by those who have to live with the deafened person. Understandably they tend to raise their voices when repeating a message but, by a cruel auditory twist, loud noises remain loud to those with high-frequency deafness. Meanwhile, quiet sounds become inaudible – hence the frequent complaint of the deafened addressee: “There’s no need to shout.”
Hearing loss is not good for the spirit or conducive to sweetness and light in the home. Irritated with yourself, you become irritable with others, then withdrawn. You tend to give up the effort to keep track of a half-heard conversation and fall into a private reverie. Deafness can cause or exacerbate depression to which, like many writers, I am temperamentally prone anyway.
You might think that of all the professions a novelist is least affected by hearing loss and, up to a point, that is true. We compose books in silence, consumed in silence by solitary readers.
However, deafness restricts and thins out the supply of new ideas and experience on which the novelist depends to create his fictions. That former nun’s life story might have been priceless “material” and I regret its loss. I miss opportunities to eavesdrop on humanly revealing conversations on buses and in shops and to keep up with new idioms, coinages and catch-phrases that give flavour and authenticity to dialogue in a novel of contemporary life.
These days the novelist’s work does not finish when he dispatches his typescript to agent or publisher. He is expected to participate in the marketing of the finished book by submitting to interviews and taking part in meet-the-author events and book signings. It is in our own interests to do so; but for the hearing-impaired writer these occasions acquire an additional element of stress. Live broadcasting on radio or television is the most challenging, particularly if it involves group discussion, and I usually decline to do such programmes because of the risk of drying up or perpetrating some howler.
In France, which is my most important market after Britain, these media ordeals are especially stressful because, being incompetent in spoken French, I have to cope with simultaneous translation, struggling to combine the studio’s headphones or earpieces with my own hearing aids – French coming into one ear and the English translation, lagging slightly behind, coming into the other.
On a recent occasion, the presenter of a live radio round-table discussion in Paris began with a long spiel that I presumed was irrelevant to me because my simultaneous interpreter was silent, so I didn’t pay much attention. Then it dawned on me with horror that it was actually addressed to me and would conclude with a question, as it then did. “I’m sorry,” I had to answer, “I’m afraid I haven’t heard anything you said.” Someone had left a cable unplugged. The listeners must have been puzzled.
Is there anything to be said in favour of going deaf? Well, it’s a cast-iron excuse for declining to serve on committees and driving without hearing aids makes your car seem as luxuriously silent as a Rolls-Royce. I can’t think of any other advantages for the average sufferer, although there have been some whom it pushed in a productive direction.
Colin Dexter, for instance, gave up teaching and turned to writing the enormously popular Inspector Morse mysteries because he was tired of pupils mocking his deafness.
Goya was a merely competent, conventional painter until he contracted a mysterious illness in his mid-forties from which he emerged stone-deaf. All his most original work postdates that crisis so there must have been a connection. Whether Goya perceived his deafness as a blessing in disguise, I rather doubt.
Beethoven gave up his promising career as a musician and conductor to concentrate on composing when he realised he was going deaf at the age of 28, so perhaps without that affliction he would not have written so much great music; but he was never able to hear it properly himself and his condition was a constant source of anxiety, misery and regret to him.
Still, there has never been a better time in human history than now to be deaf. Recent advances in electronics, computer science and medicine have combined to make a whole range of remedial and enabling devices available to the deaf and hearing-impaired, from miniaturised hearing aids and loop systems to surgical implants and vibrotactile aids (not a sex toy, but a device for alerting the profoundly deaf person to the presence and source of sound).
Subtitles on television are a godsend (they display the words of rock songs that even people with normal hearing can’t make out) and many cinemas show English language films with subtitles, admittedly at rather antisocial times. A more recent development is the captioning of occasional theatrical performances by means of an electronic screen positioned in front of the stage.
A friend of mine with a deaf daughter, now in her forties, remembers her as a child having to sit squinting in a dark theatre at a copy of Shakespeare’s text in order to follow the play. It is an image that epitomises for me both the deprivation caused by deafness and the impressive efforts of many to overcome it; but it also serves to measure the improved facilities available for the deaf and deafened today.
Much as I appreciate them I still grieve for my loss of hearing. Being a writer, I have found some relief in writing a novel about it. But I won’t be having a launch party.
— David Lodge’s new novel, Deaf Sentence, will be published by Harvill Secker on May 1