Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  The absence of any previous university experience whatsoever prevented him from being embarrassed by standards. Yet even so, Benedict Arnold managed to grow and thrive. It was, perhaps, because the region had a highly regenerative climate, and because the sky-slopes of the Rockies were only four hours’ drive away, rather than because of Coolidge’s efforts; but Benedict Arnold continued to attract a large and reasonably good staff and student body. It managed to hold concurrently the reputation of ‘a play school’ and a good place to be. A lot of students came to Benedict Arnold because they were weakly, and their doctors recommended it (Coolidge had the wit to advertise also in medical journals). Similar reasons of health and geography, together with a high salary scale, enabled it to claim some good faculty talent. Tubercular biologists, rheumatic physicists, asthmatic sociologists and rickety soil-mechanics men abounded in its departments, coughing their way through the laboratories or limping down the corridors. But as President Coolidge often said, looking out of the window of his suite at the campus spectacle, a lot of intellectuals have been sick.

  Then there were other attractions. The excellence of the Physics Department is supposedly accounted for by the fact that, during one short-lived phase in post-war history, Party was outside missile-range. Even the English Department, in a state not noticeably teeming with literacy, had a high reputation, firstly because an enterprising member of that faculty, since gone into the advertising business, conceived the idea of approaching living poets and novelists and asking them, not for their cast-off manuscripts, which came expensive, but for their cast-off clothes, which are to be seen, displayed on facsimile dummies, in a small museum in the library; and secondly because it is in the custom of taking on, each year, a writer-in-residence – a young poet or novelist, who usually, after or even before the expiration of his term of duty, writes a novel in which the university and many of its faculty appear in print under only the faintest of disguises. This has resulted in enormous publicity for the college, and President Coolidge keeps a collection of these works in his office and sends out to his friends cyclostyled excerpts of passages which refer, usually unfavourably, to himself. ‘I think we’re making our mark with this little experiment, you know,’ he would say. ‘My guess is that it’s boosted enrolment around twenty per cent. Kids like coming here after reading those books. It’s like visiting Dove Cottage in Wordsworth’s Lake District.’

  This year, the meeting that was convened to appoint the new creative writing fellow took place, in one of the conference rooms in the Taj Mahal wing of the Administration Building, over a lunch hour toward the end of March. The lunch-hour conference was one of President Coolidge’s innovations; it had hotted up the pace of faculty life considerably. The previous president, an easy, rotund spirit who had reached the post internally through a simple willingness to take on any administrative duties enabling him not to teach, had always spoken of the great virtue of a university as being the context of leisure it provided – for thought, for disinterested study, for afternoon naps. But Coolidge . . . well, Coolidge was reputed not to sleep at all. Late-night travellers crossing the campus saw the lights in his study burning and a hunched figure leaning across the desk and, though some said he employed a man to play the part, the work he did was phenomenal. When there was none, he invented some. His regime had multiplied problems and decisions and the need for dealing with them. In addition to lunch-time conferences, there were weekend study conferences in wooden cabins up in the Rockies, and seven-day conferences in Reno or Denver.

  The committee concerned with the new writing fellow convened just before one. When they arrived, one of Coolidge’s many secretaries was setting up the large tape-recorder with which he liked to enshrine all proceedings. ‘Come right in, we’re all set,’ said the girl. ‘And talk good.’ They gathered round the shiny conference table; there were several members of the English Department, with whom the writer was officially connected: there was the present writing fellow, a humble creature in spectacles and string tie; there was Dean French, who never spoke, and Dr Wink from Business Administration, who always raised difficult objections; and there was an assistant professor from Physical Education named Selena May Sugar. They gathered together at the table, spreading out their cartons of milk, their hot-dogs and their chicken salad sandwiches. Some, not familiar with the experience, insisted on gazing through the window with white faces at the students making their way across campus to the delights of the cafeteria.

  ‘They don’t know how lucky they are,’ said Dr Hamish Wagner of the English Department. ‘Boy, could I just eat a steak in the Faculty Club right now. I just hope to God my belly won’t rumble and get onto that tape.’

  ‘Take it easy, Hamish,’ said Selena May Sugar. ‘Let’s don’t drive ourselves out of our minds.’

  Outside it was a beautiful day, and the sun tinged the snow with red; in it, through it, the students walked, in bright winter clothes, the occasional plaster cast, from a skiing accident, adding a further glow of colour to the scene (decorating plaster casts was a local student folk-art). A small scampering horde of Alsatian dogs worried the frigid, iced trees and were chased in their turn by the uniformed figures of the campus policemen, always poised against anarchy. You could almost hear the spring cascading down the Rockies, stood off there on the horizon. Insects buzzed over the campus and peered in the windows at the committee. ‘It’s beautiful out there,’ said Selena May Sugar. The campanile, an immense phallic object set directly in the middle of the campus and worshipped nightly in its dells, grottoes and parking lots, began to shake as it rang out one o’clock and followed it, as for dessert, with the state song.

  As the hour struck, the door opened and President Coolidge came in. He wore a distinctive aftershave lotion which penetrated the whole room; one always knew where he had been. He sat down at the head of the table and called the meeting to order by rapping on the wood with a large Phi Beta Kappa key he carried for this purpose. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, this meeting is to consider who, whom, I don’t know which, we should appoint to next year’s writing fellowship. Present at the meeing, oh hell, everybody, I guess. Now just a minimal point before we start talking this one out and I hand over to Harris; remember if you don’t speak right there into the mike Rosemary in the stenographic pool ain’t going to hear a single goddam word you say and you’ll be out of the record. Well, okay, I’ll pass the buck right to Harris Bourbon. Hey, where is he?’

  ‘I think he went over to the student cafeteria to get a chocolate shake,’ said an associate professor in the English Department named Bernard Froelich.

  President Coolidge looked petulant: ‘I just want to remind you all that all these meetings are scheduled for me in a very tight schedule and I have to depend on your punctuality,’ he said. Then the door was pushed open and Dr Harris Bourbon, the head of the English Department, stumbled in. The chocolate shake he had just imbibed had left its traces on his grey moustache. He was a big and totally unimpressive man who had been raised locally on a farm and had risen in the academic world through sheer endurance. He always wore, in the snowy American winter, a fantastic headpiece, a kind of Eskimo flying helmet; he took it off slowly now, shaking a flake or two of new snow from the furry earflaps, and set it on the table in front of him, while the tape-recorder recorded this piece of business.

  ‘Hit’s real cold still,’ said Bourbon, sitting down, and taking some tattered notes from his pocket. ‘Want me to give them the poop?’

  ‘If you’d do that, Har,’ said Coolidge.

  Harris Bourbon gave them the poop, while the rest sat silently round the table. He pointed out that your aim in founding your creative writing fellowship was that of conveying to your student the high ideals and distinctive standards of your creative life. But there was a problem. Writers were not what they used to be. In fact, this was an age in which the literary life was a form of delinquency and all kinds of questions had to be asked about the way writers acted. Bernard Froelich, unwrapping a h
amburger from its waxed paper, recalled that Bourbon had not done very well out of the few representations of him that had appeared in the fiction of the creative writing fellows: his unimpressive demeanour and his instinctive conservatism had been pinned down for posterity rather too neatly to please. Another problem, said Bourbon, was that Benedict Arnold was not one of the best known of your American colleges, and . . . ‘That may have been true a few years back, Har, but I wouldn’t like to think that was the situation now,’ said President Coolidge. Bourbon realized he had made a slip and tried to backtrack. The real point, he said, was that it was difficult to find anyone who was sufficiently unsuccessful to take a fellowship so remote from New York, and publishers, and the big TV networks, and yet was good enough. All the leading neglected writers had been snatched up long before by Wellesley and Bennington and Kenyon and Hillesley. The only poets and novelists who were neglected were so goddam bad they had to be, and those who wouldn’t have taken the appointment at any price because they believed that success was the mark of failure, or that to live on campus was a fate worse than death.

  ‘Well, okay, fine,’ said President Coolidge, when Bourbon’s drawling western voice had stopped, ‘but I thought you painted the picture a little black, Har. I should have thought this country was full of fine young writing men just waiting for an opportunity like the one Benedict Arnold has pledged itself to give them.’

  The present writing fellow, clearly depressed to see his sands running out, looked up and said, ‘Why, I’m sure there are a whole lot of writers who’d be very glad to be here.’

  ‘Well,’ said President Coolidge, ‘this is a man who should know, and I think while he’s here we should just give Mr Turk a little round of applause for the work he’s put in this year.’ Mr Turk bowed his head as the committee clapped him.

  ‘Waal,’ said Harris Bourbon, stubbornly, when this was over, ‘we already made a whole lot of approaches.’

  ‘In the circumstances,’ said Dr Wink from Business Administration (‘Take a BA in B.A. from B.A.’ Coolidge had advertised in the business journals), ‘I’d like to propose to this meeting that we abolish the writing fellowship completely and put these funds to another use. I have no complaint against the present fellow, Mr Turk, and I’m pleased to see him here today, but not all his predecessors have been particularly desirable men. In many cases, Mr President, their politics and values have been so undesirable as to be a menace to security. One man used to lie naked on the front lawn of a house he’d rented in a first-class section of town. My wife pointed him out to me several times. It was said that realty prices dropped substantially the whole year he was in that section. And I’m told that the man before him was not heterosexual.’

  ‘Is this an ethical objection to the fellowship, Dr Wink?’ asked Coolidge from the chair.

  ‘No, what I’m talking about is the overall failure of this project. Almost none of these writers we’ve had has been an asset to the university.’

  ‘They wrote about it.’

  ‘Not very favourably – and most of them never bothered to meet the classes allocated to them. The influence they’ve exerted over the students here doesn’t seem to be exactly the kind of thing we had in mind. One man boasted to me in the Faculty Club that he’d spent three weeks living in a closet in Thrump Hall. We have enough difficulty graduating the occasional virgin without that kind of person around.’

  ‘Well, that sounds to me like an ethical objection,’ said Coolidge. ‘Not that I’ve any objection to ethical objections, but have you any objection beside the ethical one?’

  ‘All this seems enough for me, Mr President.’

  ‘Rosemary, make a note of that ethical objection by Dr Wink, will ya? Yes, right, well, thank you. Any other objections that aren’t ethical?’

  Bernard Froelich, who had spent the last few minutes trying to get the noise of his mastication of the hamburger on to the tape, leaned to Selena May Sugar and whispered, ‘Neat.’

  ‘Ah, Coolidge is all right.’

  ‘Oh, Bernard, Selena, there’s nothing we have to say at these meetings we don’t want the whole group to hear,’ said Coolidge. ‘We’re trying to think in a group because we know we think best in a group. Can we have that again?’

  ‘I was asking Selena if she wanted some of my onions,’ said Froelich.

  ‘I said I had sufficient onions,’ said Selena.

  ‘Rosemary, forget all that in the transcript,’ said Coolidge. ‘Okay, well, has anyone else here a suggestion he wants to put into space and see if it orbits? Looks like we’re waiting for a breakthrough on this one.’

  ‘I’d just like to ask Dr Bourbon,’ said Bernard Froelich, ‘whether he thinks that it’s necessary for a writer to be a conformist before we ask him to this campus. Seems to me that could be a very dangerous policy.’

  ‘Well,’ said Bourbon, ‘I think we’re talking about a real problem here. I mean, it’s right, we want someone who’s goin’ to behave right and git on well with the students and all, carry a portion of the teachin’ load. Hit just ain’t easy.’

  ‘Perhaps that’s because we’re looking for the wrong kind of person? I should have thought that most of the major writers of our time would miss out on that definition.’

  ‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t look for a fellar of this kind. We done well for ourselves this year. Hen Turk’s been teachin’ six hours and he’s got one boy written a novel about Madison Avenue that he’s sent off to his own publisher and is expectin’ a favourable report on.’

  Froelich looked across at the present incumbent, a depressed, elderly person who wrote novels about the Old West, careful historical novels in which every trace in a set of harness, every knot in a cowboy’s string tie, was there because it had been found in the records. It was well known that he bored his creative writing classes by giving two-hour talks on researching the frontier. He sat across the table, dry and speculative, his Stetson in front of him, his gold-rimmed spectacles shining green in the glare, exactly the kind of person that Froelich hoped never to see again in the fellowship. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think that kind of demand is a mistake, but it’s your department, Harris. Still, since we’ve not been successful, maybe there’s something else we can do. I’d like to make a proposal, President Coolidge.’

  ‘Sure, Bern, yes, lay it on the table.’

  ‘Well, my thought is, why don’t we approach a foreign writer? This kind of fellowship isn’t very common over in Europe, say, and the students would learn a lot if we got someone from abroad.’

  President Coolidge nodded and said, ‘Well, that’s a nice idea, Bern, really. We can look it up, but I think I’m right in ad-libbing that there’s nothing in the statutes that limits this appointment to an American citizen, and, well, as we all know, Europe has produced one hell of a lot of great writers . . .’

  ‘I don’t see why we can’t find some American boy just starting out in the writing business who’d come to this campus and do what we tell him to,’ said Dr Wink.

  ‘I thought it had been said that all the genuine possibilities of that kind had been exhausted,’ said Froelich. ‘What I’d say about this is that the Europeans have lived with the arts a good deal longer than we have on this side. They’ve got a style to the literary life over there, and I think it might be a lesson to some of our students on this campus if we did tempt over someone like that.’ President Coolidge nodded approvingly, and Froelich found that he was growing excited. He was a complicated, ambitious person who took rather a different view of the function of the creative writing fellow from his colleagues. He thought these writers proved the superiority of creation over criticism, a thing that English Departments quickly forget about, and every excess they achieved, every shock they gave to Bourbon, provided Froelich with a peculiar pleasure. When they took off their clothes at freshmen mixers and seduced the wives of the faculty members down by the lake on campus, Froelich could do nothing but rejoice; this was the lesson of the wildness of the world
in a community that believed in reducing art to simple order.

  And Froelich felt indignant for another reason; he discerned a flavour of nervousness and conservatism in the protests that had been brought up at the meeting, and his liberal hackles were rising. Froelich, educated in the east, was perpetually amazed by the note of caution that kept being sounded in this pioneer section of the west. And also, because he was from the east, the word ‘Europe’ sounded sweetly on his tongue; he liked to repeat it among people who had dismissed that place long ago, or thought it had been abolished. So, looking round the room, shining white from the reflected snow, he went on to point out how successful European writers had always been when they had visited the campus to lecture. He recalled some of the speakers who in recent years had stirred the campus to excitement – Auden, Simone de Beauvoir, Dylan Thomas. At the mention of the last name Bourbon visibly shuddered, and Froelich, who was not only a partisan but a politician, realized he might have been running ahead rather too fast. Not all the campus had been ready for Thomas yet, and some had been too ready; he had come and gone, leaving the place in a state of disorder, a state, indeed, of oestrus.