Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘He was a very interestin’ man, but I don’t think he’d fit in for a whole year, Bernard,’ said Bourbon.

  ‘I thought he was dead now,’ said Selena May Sugar.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Froelich. ‘No, I was just using him as an example. But if someone like that seems too far out, well, there’s no race like the English for producing respectable writers.’

  ‘Well, yes, Bern, that’s right,’ said President Coolidge. ‘There are other European writers. I’ve met quite a number of them myself, I might say, and mighty nice polite people a lot of them were, too. A lot of people think of Europeans as immoral, but I found a lot of them over there were as moral as you or I. What do you say on this one, Har?’

  Bourbon was obviously very doubtful; Froelich, who knew all the flaws and uncertainties in his department head, and had long ago learned the art of exploiting them, knew he would be. But he always gave in to the sense of a meeting, lacking any positive principles of his own, and Froelich knew that his cause was as good as won. This gave him considerable pleasure, because he always liked winning causes, but also because he had further ends in view. His efforts were not over yet, and he poised himself for the second part of his campaign.

  ‘Waal,’ said Bourbon, ‘if there ain’t no limitations in the terms of the fellowship . . .’

  ‘No, we’re quite free on this one, Har, I just looked it up, we can play it by ear,’ said President Coolidge.

  ‘. . . Waal then, darn it, I think I’m in favour. We’re takin’ the hell of a chance, but why not? One thing I’d like to say right now, though. I think we oughta try to find an Englishman, and I’ll give you my reasons for that. A Frenchman or a German or someone of that kind would be nice, and I don’t want to sound prejudiced, but if we picked someone from those areas there’s a grave risk the freshmen wouldn’t understand ’em.’

  Froelich saw that Bourbon’s manner had brightened, and he realized why. Surely, Bourbon was thinking, surely in England, if anywhere, the old gentlemanly idea of the man of letters still reigned. A Gosse, a Saintsbury, even a Forster, seemed to him the kind of thing that Benedict Arnold needed most, a man of culture, a stabilizing influence. Froelich, who felt he had fed the crumbs of these thoughts to Bourbon’s imagination, knew intimately what kind of pleasure he was getting. Coolidge asked for some suggested names, and Froelich, looking around at the sense of the meeting, played his next card. He proposed the name of James Walker.

  It was a name that rang no bells. Harris Bourbon, a farmer but a gentleman, read nothing after 1895, and regarded Jude the Obscure as the ultimate in literary daring. He had said as much in his book The Bucket of Tragedy (1947), in which his concern with the Jacobean dramatists, who now occupied all his time, provoked him into condemning all literature not formally tragic in structure. Dr Hamish Wagner, another representative of the English Department, was an Auden expert who had recently taken charge of the day-to-day direction of the Freshman Composition programme. This had happened in 1955, and since that year his reading, apart from Auden, had stopped completely. All he thought about now was the Unattached or Dangling Modifier, the Gross Illiteracy, and Manuscript Mechanics, the basic principles of Comp . . . His red moustache shone bright in the snow-glare; he wanted to say something, to express approval or disapproval, but nothing came to mind, for he was irrevocably out of touch, an academic casualty. Dean French, a big urbane man, said he approved of the principle; Dr Wink said he didn’t. Selina May Sugar, who was interested in anger, seemed to recognize the name when it was put. President Coolidge nodded sagely at it.

  ‘This,’ said Froelich, ‘is the James Walker who wrote The Last of the Old Lords. He’s a youngish man, very promising. There was a story on him in Time magazine about two months back . . .’ Froelich did not know Walker, and he had picked the name fairly casually. But though he didn’t know him, he liked his general context and spirit. His name had appeared in literary magazines and little reviews in connection with Amis’s, Wain’s, Murdoch’s. At the same time he was thought rather more provincial; he was a regional man, a man who wrote about sensitives who live away from the places where things happen. In the new version of this familiar kind of English novel, the heroes are demoted half a class, rebellion is increased proportionately, significance ensues. But Walker did it all very vigorously; he had a stylish way of exposing just that very gentlemanliness and culture that Bourbon admired which made him, here and now, of special interest to Froelich. Froelich wanted a rebel, but he wanted an interesting one. Like so many Americans, Froelich was a devout democrat who was charmed by the English class system. And Walker, he had sensed, was a man who was in much the same position – a man poised between an old order and a new one, looking forward, looking back, hung between revolution and restoration. At any rate, he was likely enough to cause confusion and to take to him, Bernard Froelich. So Froelich went on to stress the advantages of his proposal, tuning his words to Coolidge, and Bourbon, and the whole committee. Walker was sufficiently well known to be meaningful to the right people, but not sufficiently well known to be cavalier. There were honours being done on both sides, and Benedict Arnold could restrain him if he proved very difficult.

  ‘Would he come out here to this savagery?’ asked Dean French, straightening his already neat necktie.

  ‘I think he would,’ said Froelich. ‘We’re offering him a real chance. That’s why it’s so neat.’

  ‘Look, Bern, just brief me some more about this man,’ said Coolidge.

  Bourbon intervened to ask if he were ‘considerable enough’.

  ‘Well,’ said Froelich, ‘let’s put it this way. He’s not a book, but he’s a chapter.’ The remark came to mind because this, to Froelich, was exactly what James Walker was. Froelich was writing a book; it was on Plight, Twentieth-century Plight, with special reference to Post-war Plight. It was a long and wide-ranging book (there is plenty of plight in the twentieth century) and Froelich was covering all there was to cover – Alienation, the Existential Dilemma, Rebellion and Angst, in their American and their English manifestations. It was a book that was important to Froelich because his chances of promotion lay in it. And of the many long chapters one of them, entitled ‘Anomie Versus Bonhomie in Contemporary British Fiction’, was to be largely concerned with the novels – so splendidly typical, so socially representative, so aptly full of The Liberal Dilemma, Loss of Self, and Us Versus Them – of James Walker. This was yet another reason for wanting the man; he could feed his life into Froelich’s book, he could be kept perpetually under observation. The pattern seemed so neat – Walker’s liberalism, his Englishness, and his very existence, ready for the observant biographer – that Froelich grew quite excited. ‘He stands for something,’ said he. ‘The new English writing at its best. Form and matter. Style and content. I’m sure we’d all learn a lot. He’s neither proletarian nor dilettante. He’s riding all the contemporary storms. He’s, well, I’d say he’s a snip.’

  ‘For forty-nine cents he’s a steal,’ said Selena May Sugar, ‘so okay, let’s steal him.’

  Dr Wink protested vigorously, but the tape-recorder flapped at the end of the reel and President Coolidge, already thinking about a meeting with the Alumni Friends of Football Committee, said, ‘Well, fine, Bern, let’s say we’ll try him. Will you get his address and write me out some kind of letter, Har, and I’ll sign it?’

  Froelich sat back with a sense of pleasure and achievement. A few alternative names were suggested and then President Coolidge brought the meeting to a close. Froelich left the room with a strange, intuitive feeling that he knew that Walker would come, that the next year would be a good one, that his own future, and his own plans for the liberalization of the campus, were already set well into motion. A mental picture of the fiery English genius, so different from Henry Turk, filled his mind. ‘You’re so smart,’ he said to himself.

  The committee meeting was held in late March, when the snowploughs were still scraping up a late new fall from the campus
paths and the cracking of ice on the streams presaged the sudden outburst of spring. Two days later, President Coolidge, pausing on his way to a ten-dollar-a-plate banquet of the Faculty Wives for Chopin, signed the letter Harris Bourbon had drafted, and soon winged messengers sped it across the Atlantic to England and James Walker, for whom the year was turning, too.

  BOOK ONE

  ‘What, you are stepping westward?’ – ‘Yea.’

  – ’T would be a wildish destiny,

  If we, who thus together roam

  In a strange land, and far from home,

  Were in this place the guests of Chance:

  Yet who would stop, or fear to advance,

  Though home or shelter he had none,

  Wish such a sky to lead him on?

  – Wordsworth

  1

  THE POST always came late to the house in Nottingham where the Walkers had a top-floor flat. By the time the postman appeared, pushing his way through the vast banks of rhododendrons that filled the untended garden, the other dwellers in the house – habitual art students, librarians, teachers who put Labour Party posters in their windows at election time and then suddenly voted Liberal – had all long since gone. Elaine Walker rose early, got their child ready for school, took her there on a baby-seat attached to the rear of her bicycle, and was already at work on the morning shift at the hospital by the time the letters flopped through into the basket behind the glass-panelled front door. Only one man was on the premises; only one man heard the sound and was stirred by it. This was James Walker, a stout, slightly thyroidic, very shambling person in his early thirties, victimized by the need for twelve hours’ sleep a day; it always fetched him out of bed, promising good fortune, another acceptance, another invitation. Why did he bother? He was a tired, lazy person, far enough from youth to be bored by new mornings. Only literacy and indignation kept him alive; the books he wrote in the silent flat were harsh, desperate messages of his impulse to marry with the world. He had a hard time of it with the day-to-day, but the little slot of the letterbox was a hole in his universe that left room for the unexpected. So he stumbled down the stairs, a glow on his stocky, lugubrious face, and went, in brown corduroy slippers, to meet possibility.

  When the American letter arrived he saw at once that it was impressive. It hung in the wire basket, an envelope of crinkly blue paper, its edges striped navy and red, franked with an enormous stamp, emblemed with the university crest (Benedictus Benedice) in a delicate grey. He took it upstairs and got back into bed with it, pulling the covers over himself to keep warm. Elaine always left him a flask of coffee; he poured some out into the beaker, took a sip to bring freshness, and then slit the envelope with his thumb and took out the inside sheet. It was a sheet of expensive ripple paper, typed in that strange new typeface that only very modern typewriters affect, and it told him, in short, that he was wanted. A request from the world! He sat up in bed and cried, ‘My God!’ He felt warmed, excited, because though he had long held to one of the most fundamental of all literary convictions, that the world owed him a living, he felt curiously disturbed now that it seemed to be offering him one. He got out of bed again, hair tousled, and lit a cigarette, wondering what he should do. It seemed to him, at first thought, that he was ready for this. A break in the universal silence, an opportunity! Here was an invitation to be what he secretly had been for so long, a writer. Though a far from diligent creature, he had now written three novels, all of them described by the weekend reviewers as promising. He had been mentioned in a few articles, and it was evident that there must be a small audience for whom he stood for something. The problem was that he had no idea who this audience was; he had never been clearly accosted by it before. His novels had made him a little money, more than enough to cover the costs of the paper he typed them on and the cigarettes he smoked while he wrote them. They dealt with heroes like himself, sensitive provincial types to whom fate had dealt a cruel blow, for whom life was too plain and ordinary to be worth much at all. In the last pages, the heroes, trapped by their remoteness from history, died or made loud perorations about social corruption. They spoke of the impulse to be better, to lead meaningful lives and, written at the kitchen table he used as a desk, as he looked out at a bored tree, they came out of his heart.

  These books had appeared in the United States as well as in England, and it had often struck him as odd that it was from America that most of the few letters he received, most of the invitations to write on his theories of literature or the personal misfortunes that had made him as he was, should come. American glossy magazines with large circulations and advertisements for very complicated corsets printed, between the corsets, the short stories that in England no one would look at; and college textbooks with titles like The Ten Best English Stories About Class reprinted them and sent fees. The American (but not the English) edition of Vogue had mentioned him in their ‘People are Talking About . . .’ column, and he had come to believe that in that foreign land (but not in England) people were. What did they say? It didn’t matter; they spoke. Time had written him up, printed his photograph, called him ‘bird-eyed, balding’. The Buffalo Public Library had bought his manuscripts, which he rewrote for the occasion, since he had destroyed them. Girls wrote him letters, and one ambitious youth in Idaho had proposed to write a thesis on him. Editors and publishers, wrote his American agent, Ellis Tilly, were dying to meet him. And this is me, he used to think, as he carried coal up two flights of stairs, really me. The letter now converted all these hints and promises into something larger, an offer. It said, You count, you exist. It came at the right time; he knew, as he lay in bed in the morning, that he had to stop being promising pretty soon, and become important, or all the fire would go out. He had to flower, to burgeon.

  The time was in all ways ripe. The two part-time jobs with which he had until lately filled out his life were coming to an unexpected end. For two years he had been teaching, in the Georgian premises of the Adult Education Centre on Shakespeare Street, an ambling, inconsequential class on modern literature to a group of day-release clergymen. Across the road was the now emptied University College where Lawrence had gone; he could see it from the window as he debated on the disease-imagery of Women in Love. But the group had dwindled, out of boredom or offence, and had now gone. He also used to wear, for a pittance, experimental socks for a local knitwear firm, but a scientific advance had ousted him. Now all he did was to write, alone in the flat, until Elaine came home in the later afternoon, bringing Amanda with her. When he thought about his life, it seemed to him resourceless and minute. The realities he lived among gave nothing back, and he imagined a universe of energy in which he might find himself at home. Now he stood at the window and looked down, through the steaming chimney-pots, at the city centre, with its spires and chimneys, the round dome of the Council House, the squat shape of the castle, the tooth-like slab of the technical college, the high cranes standing webbily up where bookshops were being replaced by office-blocks; the city stood in a bowl, like old flowers, and he felt that its provincial mist had seeped into his soul and stayed there, a standing, always forecast fog. The rain blew in his heart as well as outside the windows. A blackbird, wedged in the budding tree in front of him, sang a spring song; he felt his own need for new leaves. But the sap, indoors, in here, had stopped flowing. He took the letter and went through into the living room, dense with last night’s cigarette smoke. Here they were – his radio, his table-lamps, his coal-bucket, his armchair, the sum total of his visible achievement. A toy panda lay on its face on the hearthrug, as if it was being sick. He recalled an old vitality and felt that environment had squeezed it from him; he seemed to suffer from sleeping sickness or, like the potted plants on the windowsill, from wilt.

  But by contrast the letter in his hand wriggled with life. Ah, an envoy! It offered a promise of esteem, a taste of freedom, and a passable salary for being free. And freedom – that meant something to Walker. He shared in his heart, and with energy, the in
tellectual conviction that tells us we have a big debt to pay off to anarchy for all the civilization we have gathered around us. Disorder he willingly waved forward. For he felt not only bored by what he did, but guilty for it too. Art was life; it was written out of growth, and he had none. And didn’t freedom and anarchy and growth cluster together when the word America was mentioned? A lot of young writers went to America now; in fact, all of them did; it was a necessary apprenticeship. Ought one to reject possibility, or even resist the trend? He belonged, after all, to a generation of literary men, all of whom, thanks to a common educational system and a common social experience, had exactly the same head, buzzing with exactly the same thoughts. It was a virtual guarantee of success, then, that others had been. He dropped the letter on his desk, piled with five first chapters of an evidently unworkable novel, and walked round the room in a burst of excitement, seeing new landscapes in which mesas and skyscrapers mingled together in improbable confusion. Give yourself, said his heart, spend some spirit. But what was there to spend? And how, day-to-day, would it be? No, he was lost; he would have to ask Elaine.

  The thought, once thought of, complicated the matter. It was known, even to him, that he was a married man. And Elaine, who had a sick mother to whom she dutifully fed Brand’s Essence, would not leave her; that he knew. Intellectual temptations were not the stuff of her world. And Walker hardly felt that he could manage without her; on the other hand, he realized, with some suddenness, that he wanted to try. The eight years of his marriage had been exactly like the life of a foreigner in England; everything had been comfortable, domestic, snug, but kicking and screaming of the spirit occurred regularly as one thought of the real world outside. Walker had, in his young days, been something of a wild young man; he used to sit in coffee bars, wearing a small, dissident beard, and occasionally he would meet and seduce young groping girls whose parents had annoyed them. He would go to wild parties and walk home late at night through the suburbs, kicking over milk bottles. That was all gone but not forgotten. He had met Elaine about three years after he had taken his degree at the university, met her at a dance. At this time he was still leading a life of furtive studenthood; he had found out that one of the things about a university was that no one stopped you going in, so even then he had gone on attending, playing bridge with the students, using the library, often sleeping in the university grounds. It had been the ideal creative life, though at that time he had not actually written anything; just being a writer was enough.