Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  The whole ship, though, seemed somehow reassuring – with its bulky decor, its fitting of inlaid wood, the dedicated effort of tasteless craftsmen, the solemn commitment to tea, the small orchestras and the bridge, the vestigial displays of deference and service from rubber-lipped stewards. It was a failing reassurance, of course; like a country house made over into a lunatic asylum, it presupposed more grace and quality in its inhabitants than in fact they had. It promised the grand voyage, if people were prepared to voyage grandly, but what Walker had learned in one afternoon was that this was an illusion. He walked around some more and at last came to the Winter Garden Lounge, where the places for dinner were being issued. There was a long queue, of which Walker discovered himself to be the perpetual tail; he was, presumably, the last person in tourist class to realize what was happening. In this room, the decor was slightly more heady; the chairs were of green wicker, the mural displayed a scene of pastoral licentiousness, and there were a few carnivorous-looking flowers set in tubs. The radio was playing Children’s Hour; a pop group, called the Haters, were tunelessly celebrating dim proletarian adolescent oestrus. He stood in line, wondering how in this world he was going to manage. It struck him that one of the main reasons for his attentive concern with sex and marriage and individual people was that he had always felt at odds with this kind of mass situation. It brought out the Shelley in him, seeking the single meaningful soul who could lead him through the mob chaos. How would he manage here? What about the get-together dance, this night? Would persuasive patter come to his lips, would his one dance-step, which he used like a skeleton key for every ballroom situation, fit the case and bring him companionship and escape? The curse of solitude, the one flaw in his argument for leaving home, sat heavy on him. He began mentally to prospect, not for infidelity, but for some nice girl who would understand, hide with him in some dark, quiet place behind the funnel, sit out the journey. But even finding so much required a rare energy and facility, and the lethargy of the last eight years had left him rusty even in those skills. He saw that he was back, a damaged creature, with the old familiar problems of the world.

  The queue moved onward and he reached the table at which the uniformed purser sat, fair-haired and amiable. ‘I’m afraid there’s not much left, sir,’ he said. ‘We’ve got some places at the children’s sitting; the only thing for second sitting is one place at a table for six.’ ‘Oh well, I’ll take that,’ said Walker. He placed the ticket he was given carefully in his wallet. Going out of the lounge, he had a vision; he caught sight of himself in a dolphin-etched, full-length mirror. In his brown, fibrous, hard-wearing suit, with its large lapels and wide-bottomed trousers, he looked like a little ghost from the provincial past, tired, deeply out of touch. It didn’t bode well for his chances; it showed him wan, wind-blown, incomplete. He looked for a moment; he flattened a violent spurt of hair on his head, pulled in his stomach, pushed the knot of his handwoven tie so that it covered the collar-button. It didn’t do much.

  The ship’s hooter sounded. He found the door that led to the deck and pulled it open. Outside he found himself pinned by the wind and struck by the cold. He went over to the rail, the sea was roaring into his nostrils. Southampton, down below now, sat in an air of quiet pride, as if nothing one could do would change or abuse it. It made him feel almost pleased that he was going, though he still was conscious of his inadequacy, though he knew he was going into a world bigger than he could understand, though a sick feeling in his stomach joined with the disturbing faint sway of the ship to make him feel less than fine. A crane on the shore ran out with a rattle of chain. Far down below him the last passengers came up the canvas-covered gangplank. The ship’s side fell sheer to the dock and the black water. The hook of a crane was hitched to the gangplank and it began to move out of the ship’s side. He walked round the deck to the seaward rail. Salt air blew up in his face; the wind slapped off the waves to hit him; the huge white lifeboats, suspended above, boomed gently in the breeze. The black curdy water floated below; the tugs were on; the sun was lighting the bottom of the sky. It was a confused, undesigned seascape, too much tinged with business and industry, cranes and dockers, to be romantic, too dirty and impersonal and vast for Walker to feel that it was his. Suddenly there came a little lurch; he looked down again to see the tugs pulling, churning a great vortex in the sea. The wild suction, the tossing of dirty waters, whirled violently in his head. ‘Call me Ishmael!’ he cried. A siren roared over him, rattling his eardrums, and grit from the funnel fell on him. On the other side, on the roof of the Ocean Terminal, a small band boomed martial music, and people were waving and shouting. He could see Southampton untying itself and beginning to float away. His sensations reached the full; a multiplicity of allegiances left him confused. He felt doses of guilt for leaving his wife, his child, his home; he felt little spurts of pride at being able to do it; he felt little throbs of queasiness at the awareness of the risks that there were in the doing. It was all a mystery beyond him; he was at the centre of a vast web of forces, but he was bare, forked Walker, alone in the universe, with nothing to claim of it, nothing he knew he ought to do. Yet expectation remained.

  It was cold on deck, but he stayed there until dinner, watching the ship go out through the estuary and seeing the shoreline fade. The tugs went off; above him the high red funnel tossed a bluster of smoke into the sky, and the wire struts sang in the wind. To the stern, a trail of seagulls gathered over the wake. Further back was England, with the dusk eating away the headland, cliffs, the squatting houses, the bright metal chimneys of the oil refineries. A vast dark raincloud hung over Southampton, scattering darkness and a hazy summer rainfall. The lights of the ferries, crossing between the mainland and the wooded capes of the Isle of Wight, shone. Triangular sails of yachts showed by the shore; grey defensive ships stood sleek in the channel. Then the sea began to dwarf them all; the meaning slipped, the world became a volume of air and sea, almost an excess of it, in which an occasional ripple perked up, grew into a wave, fell back. The kingdom of necessity was going from view; onward, then, to the kingdom of light. Would the thin fluffy strands of affection that tied him to the shore break? He felt almost nothing; the sensations were over; he belonged to the ship. Presently a fat round steward, a bundle of chimes cradled in his arms, donged out the dinner anthem along the deck. Walker retired down below into the comfort of this travelling institution, hungry for the meal.

  2

  WHEN EARLY SUMMER with its bright clear days has brought the academic year to a close, emptying chalky classrooms and leaving books at rest on library shelves, then academic folk long to go on pilgrimages. On both sides of the Atlantic they gather on the piers; their baggage is around them, their typewriters are handy, their card index is carefully packed in their stateroom luggage. They are off on mythological journeys in both directions. Floating in the harbours of New York and Southampton and Cherbourg, American professors going east stare across their ships’ rails at European professors going west. Learning and wisdom lie before them, isolated on the other side of the Atlantic. In America the numbers are large, the grants are generous. And so from Palo Alto and Boston they gather in their hundreds, professors and instructors and graduate students, to gather on the dock on the west side of New York. They go aboard the fat liners, their prows hard against the riverside expressways. There are those who have been before, those going for the first time, those who have just come down in the taxi and are to be left behind. The tugs go on, and they ease out, down past the Battery. Give us your poor, your tired, your huddled masses, says the Statue of Liberty as they pass it, and we will give them homogenized milk, send them to college, and return them to you on a Fulbright. They line the rail until, Nantucket light once past, they go below and the social life of liners gets under way. There are girls to pinch and write stories about, there are short-term acquaintances to be made in the lounge, there is orientation for wives and new boys. How many raincoats does one need for England? Is the milk safe in Pari
s? Does one need typhoid shots for the Edinburgh Festival, and are the mosquitoes in Vienna malarial? Thus, with a certain nervousness about prophylactics, an even greater nervousness about the prime European terror, servility, and a sense of acting in the great tradition of Franklin and Jefferson and James, the New World, clean, fresh, and decent, comes to captivate the Old.

  It is a little later in the summer that the voyagers in the reverse direction convene, a smaller and altogether seedier band of pilgrims, altogether too few in number for the historians of race-migration to notice. They are worried about their errand, doubtful about the misfortunes that will befall them. Suppose they get ill in America, outside the sphere of the maternal National Health Service? Will the dog be all right with Mother? And does the milkman really understand that he isn’t to call for a whole year (think of all the bottles if he did)? Their clothes, on the whole, are thick and woolly; their suitcases have been in the family for twenty years. They tingle with silent, unassertive patriotism and with doubts about the value of what they are doing. Chance, new alignments of wealth and power, have pushed their journey in this direction, but they can’t help wondering whether they haven’t set a foot wrong and blighted their careers, their morals, their gastro-intestinal tracts. So they gather in the bright light of the Ocean Terminal and then go abroad – professors and lecturers who have fought all year for sabbaticals no one felt they deserved (surely going to America is a holiday?), bright young men fresh from graduation ceremonies carrying mint theses and X-ray photographs of their chests, and writers and editors hoping to produce another book about America without leaving the apartment they have borrowed in Greenwich Village. They compare notes, studying the relative merits of their scholarships (English-Speaking Union fellows get met on the boat; but Harkness fellows get the use of a rented car); they compare destinations and lists of exploitable friends. They are painfully aware that there is no real tradition in what they are doing, except that tradition, set up by Dickens and Matthew Arnold and Mrs Trollope, of going to America and disliking it.

  It pleased Bernard Froelich, sitting on his patio in Party, drinking iced drinks and watching the sprinklers fizzing on his dried-out lawn, to consider that this year he was promoting a voyage in reverse. Party’s contribution to the Sabbatical Generation had already left town, but Froelich was not miserable to remain. For what he saw ahead of him was a good year, his year, the year when Europe came to America. He had lost to Europe the men he had wished to lose; he had gained from Europe the man he had wished to gain. It was a balance of power ideal enough to console him for the fact that his sabbatical wasn’t due for two more years, that the British Museum and the all-night Boots in Piccadilly were still twenty-four months ahead. The boats to Europe had taken away two of the men he had most detested in the faculty; the boat from Europe was now on the water bringing him the man he really wanted to meet. The heat sang on the house-roofs, he felt the sweat in his sneakers, he looked into the blue of the sky and found that this year there was none of the old yearning to be away. The future bloomed, a future without Wink and Leonov, a future with James Walker.

  He happily spared his enemies. Dr Wink, the man from Business Administration who had opposed Walker’s appointment (‘Our aim in this business school is not to produce a narrow academic guy but to well-round his personality so he can sell himself to everyone he meets’), was off on a Guggenheim to Perugia, where he was loaned to well-round the Latin personality for a year. S. Leonov, another of Froelich’s bêtes noires, was also en route, leaving Froelich with a zestful sense of freedom. Leonov was a large, square-faced old man who had skilfully escaped Russia before the Bolshevik revolution and now graced Benedict Arnold, where he had charge of Russian History, teaching the only course in the university in which J. Edgar Hoover’s The FBI Story was a set text. He was an implacable enemy of Froelich, whom he had once denounced as a one-man protest movement undermining the fabric of this our life academical. He lived in a decaying house in Party where he gathered together a small émigré circle which met for pre-revolutionary evenings; they began (Froelich had been invited there in the early days of his tenure in Party, before hostilities began) with a dull two hours devoted to the eating of blinis and the telling of stories about Tolstoy talking to clods of earth, and ended with the condemnation of America’s softness toward present-day Russia. During the McCarthy period Leonov had helped to bring about the departure from the university of three men who had been members of timid left-wing groups in the thirties, though he had missed the one active communist on the staff, a man so cunning in concealment that it was virtually impossible for him actually to be actively active, so well camouflaged that he had been approached for funds by the John Birch Society (he had paid, of course). Yet another enemy of Froelich’s, Henry Leibtraub, a Jewish intellectual in the department of Theater Arts and Communication Skills, who took the advanced stand that what modern liberals had most to beware of were the compulsions in themselves that made them modern liberals, was off to England for one semester to supply one of his famous static productions of Hamlet in Reverse, which begins with the killing of Claudio and then goes backwards through the text looking for a motive. The forces of darkness, confusion, and reaction had dissipated; the sunlight shone through; the year was a year of possibilities and campaigns. All that remained was to await the arrival of the man who was to be ally and admirer, the man who would understand and applaud, the man who had taken the creative writing fellowship. Froelich drank his gin and tonic and looked across at his wife. ‘Hurry up, James Walker,’ he said.

  ‘It seems a very intellectual ship,’ said James Walker, as his three cabin-mates introduced themselves to him that evening just before dinner. He washed his face and watched them in the mirror, Julian, Richard, and Dr Millingham. They were bright, classless youths in tab-collars and suede jackets, with short hair and well-scrubbed faces. ‘I’m surprised they let anyone aboard with less than a first,’ he said, squeezing through as he made for the dining room. There he found his table for six and sat in lonely state, the first arrival, listening to two youths at the next table talking about The Faerie Queene. I never thought I’d be embarrassed about my ignorance on a ship, he thought.

  ‘Hullo then,’ said a grey-skinned, demoralized-looking steward who appeared from behind a pillar to flick away some crumbs from the table with a dirty cloth, ‘aren’t you going to put on the paper-hat?’

  ‘Is it compulsory?’ asked Walker, noticing the party items that lay beside each plate.

  ‘We always do this on the first night,’ said the steward. ‘Fun, you know. Be a sport, go on.’ Walker picked up a tiny black cardboard bowler, which stuck raffishly on his head, giving him the look, he could see in the pink wall mirror, of a rather tipsy civil servant. He sat like this for ten minutes, while nobody came. Finally a small round Indian came and sat at the far end of the table.

  ‘Good evening,’ he said, ‘I see you are having a party.’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘It is always pleasant to wear such hats and enjoy oneself enormously,’ said the Indian, putting on a false nose. ‘I have met these customs before on P and O. That is Pacific and Orient. It is the ships that cross to India. India is my native land.’

  ‘Really?’ said Walker.

  ‘Hoho!’ said the Indian, pulling at his false nose to speak more clearly. ‘Already I am excited. I am looking at the menu for smoked salmon. That is a very fine dish. However, there does not appear to be any.’

  ‘Smoked salmon is first-class hors d’oeuvre,’ said the steward. ‘Down here it’s pickled herrings.’

  ‘Alas,’ said the Indian.

  ‘I say! Hats!’ said a voice at Walker’s side, and a girl of about thirty, with frizzy red hair and a large figure, attempted to sit down. She wore a black suit with an astrakhan collar.

  ‘Oh, please be careful,’ said the Indian, rising. ‘These chairs are fastened with hooks to the floor. It is a precaution against big gales. If you do not take your seat carefully
you will certainly fall down. Has anyone here listened to the weather report?’

  ‘I’ll put mine on,’ said the girl, donning a tarboosh. ‘Why, is the weather going to be bad? I thought these ships were too big to be affected anyway.’

  ‘Oh, no,’ said the Indian, ‘sometimes the big ships are wery wery bad indeed.’

  ‘Lavender’s blue, dilly dilly, lavender’s green,’ said a croaking old voice on the opposite side of the table; the dowagerly lady Walker had noticed on the train was taking the seat opposite him.

  ‘Anybody here play shuffleboard?’ cried a man with a Brigade tie, sitting down across from the Indian. The sixth place, between the old lady and the Indian, opposite the frizzy-haired girl, remained vacant a moment longer, and then there came to it Dr Jochum, the European–American Walker had travelled down with in the Pullman, fully changed, dressed in dinner jacket.

  ‘Ah, hello there, my young friend!’ he cried.

  ‘Good evening,’ said Walker.

  ‘I say, that’s not fair,’ said the old lady. ‘Some people know people already.’

  ‘Are you, er, going to a university?’ Walker asked the frizzy-haired girl next to him.

  ‘Oh no, nothing so grand. I’m going to be a secretary in St Louis. That’s in Mo.’

  ‘I am going to a university,’ said the Indian. ‘It’s a wery big university. It is called Harward.’

  ‘All this education’s getting out of hand, isn’t it?’ said the old lady to no one in particular.

  ‘I suppose we are moving,’ said the frizzy-haired girl.

  ‘Yoho for the life of a tar,’ said the old lady.

  ‘You know,’ said Dr Jochum, ‘my experience of ships is that on them one makes an interesting discovery about the world. One finds one can do without it completely. Here we are, away from land, and we are totally content with ourselves. I have a theory, a very whimsical theory, that sea voyages are the only part of eighteenth-century life which have survived into the present. Here we have servants, we have leisure, we can cultivate conversation, we even have cheap gin. I want to go to the captain and say, Stop the ship! This is all we need for the rest of our lives!’