Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  So they drove on in silence for a bit, the big car humming on the concrete. Now wide low automobiles, their visages set in bright metal grins, began to flip by them. A few wooden houses appeared in clusters, with an occasional imbecile farmhand doddering in the weedpatch at the back. The land, black and arid, changed its texture under the busy sky; here and there, a large hog, lowslung and menacing, rooted on wire-fenced land. Occasionally they saw a steer, carrying with it the whole ethic of the west. These were lands that Froelich had come slowly to love, and he wanted to share them, but Walker seemed only to gaze on them in mystery, as if vainly trying to discover their imaginative principle. He tried again and said: ‘What do you think of America, old boy?’

  ‘I don’t know yet,’ said Walker. ‘I think it’s confusing. I can never make up my mind whether people are being friendly or hostile. Most of the time they seem to be both simultaneously. And in New York . . . well, in New York I never knew whether I was going to be welcomed or murdered. You don’t know who to trust.’

  Trust me, Froelich wanted to say, except that he wasn’t trustworthy. He said, ‘I suppose we make relationships differently.’

  ‘If that’s what they are. I was beginning to think that in America relationships had nothing to do with people at all.’

  ‘I can see that. We make up our minds first and then spray the attitudes we have on to the people we meet. Not like jolly old England.’

  ‘No, quite.’

  ‘Talking of relationships, are you married?’

  ‘I’m not a homosexual, if that’s what you mean.’

  ‘I didn’t mean that.’

  ‘Oh, sorry, so many Americans seem to think that Englishmen are.’

  ‘No, I tell you, I’ve been to England, you can go easy with me.’

  ‘Well, yes, I am married,’ said Walker, as if he was loath to make the confession.

  ‘Good, that’s nice. Any kids?’

  Again there was a silence, until Walker forced himself to say, ‘One.’

  ‘A girl or a boy?’

  ‘A girl.’

  ‘Great.’

  ‘It’s all right, I suppose,’ said Walker.

  ‘Why didn’t you bring them along with you?’

  ‘The money wasn’t good enough,’ said Walker, as if pleased to be slightly discourteous again.

  ‘You should have written and told us. We might have been able to rustle up a grant from somewhere.’

  ‘Well, no,’ said Walker. ‘Actually, I think I shall work better on my own.’

  ‘Are you planning to do some work out here? I mean, besides your teaching?’

  ‘I want to start another book, if I get the time and the ideas.’

  ‘Well, this really is the place. You couldn’t come to a better. It’s a really creative atmosphere. All the men write books and all the women get pregnant. One long fertility rite. I suppose the point really is that we’re so cut off there’s nothing else to do.’

  ‘I see,’ said Walker. ‘Do you write?’

  ‘I’m writing a scholarly book, but I don’t write novels, if that was your question. I have this block: I can’t bear to put my friends down on paper.’

  ‘I suppose someone has to stand by and watch.’

  ‘Oh, I do that,’ said Froelich. He was pleased to see that Walker was growing more genial; the day brightened again for him, like the sun coming out on the dark plain.

  ‘By the way,’ said Walker, growing forthcoming. ‘I met someone you probably know coming over from England on the boat.’

  ‘Did you? Who was that?’

  ‘Someone who teaches here at Benedict Arnold, a man called Jochum.’

  ‘You met Jochum?’ cried Froelich. It was a name that brought Froelich no pleasure at all, and he was worried to think that someone else not of his spirit might have reached this man first, have taught him about a different west and a different Benedict Arnold.

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker patiently. ‘He was on the same ship.’

  ‘There’s a person you need to watch,’ said Froelich.

  Walker bristled and grew distant again. ‘He seemed a very pleasant man indeed,’ he said.

  ‘Oh, he’s pleasant. We have a whole crowd of those people. They’re our émigré colony. They all play chess and eat apfelstrudel together. And shake their fingers at you. “Ach, mein friendt, you Americans, you are zo innocent, zo liberal.” ’

  ‘That’s it,’ said Walker. ‘Nice man.’

  ‘Yes, good with the finger.’

  Walker went silent once more. They drove past more houses, more hogs, more gullys, more cars. ‘Tell me something, Mr Walker,’ said Froelich, after some minutes. ‘What’s all this you’ve been getting so mad about over there in England?’

  ‘Mad?’

  The point of Froelich’s question was that Walker had been described in the press as ‘an angry young man’. He had been pictured in Time magazine, leaning against a tree, in the rain, a long scarf down to his crotch, over the caption: ‘Phoneys make me puke.’ Froelich had the clipping in his wallet, along with several others about Walker. But far from seeming, now, angry, Walker looked excessively phlegmatic. As for being an angry young man, he didn’t look all that young either – though the English were notoriously deceptive, since none of them took enough exercise, except those who took too much. He was going bald; his stomach was potted; he wore a dotard’s knitted cardigan, and his suit made him look as if he had been rolled over by a sheep. The general impression suggested middle age. Nor, clearly, was he a scintillating conversationalist, if this car ride represented his talents in that direction; in fact, you couldn’t get a tweet out of him. Froelich was still prepared and ready to respect him, but truth to tell he had been expecting, when he drove out to the depot, someone a bit more like Tom Wolfe or D. H. Lawrence, someone burning with tension, articulate about his plan for saving the world. Walker gave the impression of being permanently on the edge of sleep; he looked like that kind of Englishman who seems to have been rained on too much. Froelich, knowing the difficulties of the English, was not disappointed, but he was more than ever curious about the principle of Walker’s anger. He knew it as a critic, observed it in the books, but where did it lie in the man? What kind of turmoil was he going to cause in the Department? How would he fill out the role Froelich had designed for him? He said: ‘Aren’t you an angry young man?’

  Walker said, angrily, ‘No.’

  ‘This angry young man business just doesn’t make sense to me,’ said Froelich. ‘The way I understand it, and I may be wrong on this, but the way I see it is that a lot of fellows who have been sent free to university by the government are complaining that the government is lowering standards by letting fellows like them in. I suppose this is English liberalism.’

  ‘I’m not one,’ said Walker. ‘Admittedly there are a lot of things I dislike about England just now. I’ve written about some of them.’

  ‘What kind of things?’

  ‘Well, I think we’re being over-Americanized, for a start.’

  ‘How tough,’ said Froelich.

  ‘I didn’t mean to be rude.’

  ‘No, I agree with you.’

  ‘I mean that we take the wrong things and we use them badly. It means American hamburgers that don’t taste like hamburgers and American television programmes of the worst rather than the best kind . . . I’d like us to take other things, some of the excitement and freedom that Americans seem to have. But I’m not an angry young man. It’s a silly label and I hope it won’t be pinned on me. It makes me so furious.’

  ‘Oh, don’t worry,’ said Froelich, trying to forget the posters for Walker’s public lecture in the Fogle Auditorium (which he still didn’t know about) which, draped all over Humanities Hall and the English Building, used the phrase with what Froelich now recollected as ceaseless repetition. ‘So you came to the States for the excitement of it?’ asked Froelich.

  ‘Yes, if it really exists. Does it?’

  ‘Well, you’ll
see. I think you’ll find a certain amount of excitement in Party. It’s mainly a university town.’

  ‘Where is it?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Don’t worry, that really exists. It’s over this next rise. You’ll see it in a couple of minutes.’

  ‘So there’s plenty going on, is there?’

  ‘Intellectually? Yes, I suppose there is. Scrabble, red-baiting, wife-swapping. The auditorium series brings visiting plays and orchestras. There’s an art theatre just off campus, mainly showing Sellers and Bergman. There’s a university bookstore with the best selection of ring-binders in the state. It’s a mixed campus. We teach things like driver-education and animal husbandry, but the English Department, well, they’re not entirely committed men, but they have character. I don’t know how you’d measure it against the civilization you come from. My guess is that you’ll find what you take for granted in England is only veneer out here in Party. But that’s the thrill, I think. Oh, there’s one thing. It’s a dry campus. There are no liquor stores in Party. If you go into the bars they serve 2.5 beer. To buy real liquor you have to go a couple of miles away from campus.’

  ‘Why is that?’ asked Walker.

  ‘It’s a state law. Benedict Arnold is slightly paradoxical in that it’s both a private and a state university. We draw on some state funds. This means that the state has some power over us, and that means they can keep us dry and also apply the loyalty oath. In fact, because of our constitution, their rights are a little hazy, and we keep challenging them. You’ll see some activity in that direction while you’re here, I would guess. Are you a liberal?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker, ‘I think I am.’

  ‘Good.’

  ‘What about the students?’

  ‘They’re mixed too. We have a lot of out-of-state students because of the attractions of Party. But quite a number of instate students too.’

  ‘They live at home?’

  ‘Some of them do, others in dormitories and apartments. I have a girl in one of my classes who lives with her parents in the south of the state and flies herself in by private plane every day. You know – I’m sorry I cut class, Professor, but there was a fog hazard and I had to fly on to Detroit. But most live in apartments and the fraternities and sororities. Nice kids. You’ll probably hear them in a minute, baying for someone’s blood. Incidentally, they’re pretty liberal and they fight with the citizens – who aren’t.’

  At that moment the car topped a rise and they could see the town, quite suddenly, laid out on the slope in front of them. It was set in trees. They drove downward to meet it. As they did so, they could see, on the long dark line of the horizon, something new. Where the grey grasslands seemed to end, a row of wigwam-like formations, some straight, some tilted, some grey-brown in colour, others streaked with green, some touched at the top with white, were scribbled upwards into the sky. These imperfect triangles had an immense quality; something striking and sombre about them always gave Froelich a catch of pleasure whenever he topped this ridge and saw them. He heard Walker gasp at his side. ‘What’s that?’ he asked.

  ‘Those are the Rockies.’

  Walker said, ‘Aren’t they marvellous?’

  Froelich looked at him and loved the man. The eye, embedded in that cold flesh, saw, then; passion could take root, enthusiasm grow, in that fleshly rind. Froelich warmed, as he had intended to do, in his genius, and felt the man grow in stature. Walker too knew an occasion when he saw one. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I think I will take off my tie.’

  ‘Do that,’ said Froelich. He watched as Walker unknotted his tie and loosened the top button of his shirt, spreading the great wings of his collar wide, English-style, as in old movies, across the lapels of his jacket. The gesture took Froelich back to Earl’s Court and the beach at Brighton, where middle-aged Englishmen, beaming with paternity, exposed pallid pink-tinged sweating flesh to public view, as if to make a positive assertion of their asexuality. Walker’s flesh had the same kind of grossness and unreality, as if it didn’t exist for anything, as if none of his living was done in relation to it. But the gesture was more important than that: it was assertion of comradeship and commitment; it was an abandonment of a whole culture; it was a promise that here was a man who would yield and give something to America and to Party. Froelich knew that there was more than a collar to be undone over these next few months. ‘There,’ he said, feeling a strange warm glow of triumph and promise, ‘now you’re a beatnik.’

  Walker looked at the mountains and knew that they had come just at the right time. For the Walker who descended from the transcontinental flyer into the middle of the American void, and now sat beside his terrifying companion in the car, washed over by landscape and incomprehensible discourse, was not the man, was less than the man, who had sailed in, a few days before, past the Statue of Liberty with a note of hope in his spirit. So much had happened since then; and all of it was bad. What was sought, on his part, was sense and design; what was offered, on the world’s part, was the other – violence and meaninglessness and anarchy. Was this then the promise, the liberty? If it was, why grumble at chains? The days had gone by, immersing him in disjunction. What New York had begun, the train journey westward had finished. For nearly two days now he had sat in lowered spirits as the train perambulated the country, while cities faded and were replaced by untiring plain. The tree became a forgotten European elegance. Onward they drifted, coursing, bells ringing, through the backs of middle-western towns and cities, where grey cupolas had peered through the window-glass at him over liquor stores, and where networks of iron fire-escapes had competed with high-tension wires to give a sense of temporariness and disorder and clutter. The towns were as he expected Russian towns to be, half-staked settlements clinging to the steppe. Dogs in dustbowls celebrated a somnolent deadness; small boys exposed their genitals on ashpits; birds with heavy feet plodded about the landscape. The dust from the Pullman seats flew about the coach. America grew vaster and vaster, less and less controllable. When the nothingness reached its greatest, and the prairie reached its barest, when nature said nothing and did less, then the train had stopped, to deposit him and him alone, to put him between naked sky and naked ground, to leave him stranded where his style and his thoughts bounced shimmering mirages and unwatered desert.

  And from out of the desert, like the djinn in the Arabian Nights, had come Froelich, big and bouncy, threatening and cajoling, all bonhomous destruction, demanding an accounting. In the car, watching the concrete road stretch ahead of him into the unpromising future, Walker thought again of home. A faint name stated itself: it said, Elaine, Elaine. Walker wanted to let it go, wanted to be here, but it sang and sang. Froelich picked it up, as if by intuition, and twisted it with a question. It needed the mountains, and they came. He had seen the Rockies, wigwams of stone, and the seed that had grown enough to bring him here began to sprout again. They dominated the sky and designed it. Below them, as if in response, the world began to change. Signs began to flick past. They said WATCH FOR SNOWPLOWS and YIELD and REACH FOR A CIGARETTE AND DIE. A few houses appeared on each side of the highway; a sign said THICKLY SETTLED. Then a vast spread of roadside services appeared, small restaurants and diners and service stations, recognizing human existence and human need. They addressed the traveller with monosyllabic communications, clearly knowing he must be exhausted: EAT, they said, and GAS and SLEEP and (rather more mysteriously) WORMS. Then came the boundary of the citadel, the social note: a sign said Party: Pop. 15,000 Happy People and a Few Soreheads. The Lions, declared a sign adjacent, met lunchtime Thursdays in the Van Der Pelt Sunshine Hotel. The Hallelujah Baptist Church on Main Street was ‘the Church where Jesus is REAL’. The KKK Motel was recommended by the AAA. Here was life and God and love; all these things could still go on, even out here; man in his inexhaustible inventiveness could be social anywhere. That in itself gave a sort of hope.

  ‘Here we go!’ cried Froelich, waving his hand around him. ‘Party!’ The car wobbled and
he grabbed the wheel again. ‘There’s your neighbourhood shopping centre, out here we buy our groceries.’ Walker looked out at a large expanse of parking lot, around which a few stores had congregated; the Grabiteria, advertising a free bear’s paw with a five-dollar food order, a laundromat called the Doozy Duds, and an establishment called the Big ’n’ Beefy dominated by a sign showing a gross, meat-laden hamburger. A few girls clad in clothes that suggested they had just come off the line of chorus-girls at the theatre walked among cars carrying small trays. Then came society of greater complication yet. The fire-station, a palace of crystal with an incongruous Swiss-chalet roof, looked like a romp of Eero Saarinen; the court house, one block later, was a domed institution in high Gothic style, capped with a lead roof and defended on two sides by a Civil War cannon, muzzle packed with paper, and a small naval aircraft missing its propeller. Loungers sat on the low walls around, chewing Mail Pouch tobacco and reflecting with all the sagacity of the local yokel on the passing parade.

  ‘Can we stop at the post office?’ said Walker, feeling vastly better, able to plan and to prognosticate. ‘I’d like to send a telegram. It’s to abroad.’

  ‘You can’t send a telegram from the post office,’ said Froelich. ‘You send it through Western Union.’