Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘America’s grateful to you for comin’,’ said Bourbon, very sincerely, as he sat down.

  ‘Vell, here England’s loss is America’s gain,’ said Jochum, gesturing at Walker.

  ‘Well, thank you,’ Walker said, ‘but I’m only staying for a year.’

  ‘No, you vill stay longer,’ said Jochum positively. ‘Where will you find people so nice? And chairs so comfortable to sit in? Does this happen so often?’

  ‘One can outstay a welcome,’ said Walker.

  ‘I hope you do not mean me.’

  ‘No, not at all,’ Walker replied. ‘I’m thinking of myself. I expect I shall end up a perpetual commuter. That’s what happens so often.’

  ‘Ah, yes, mid-Atlantic man, happy in neither place. Yes, I see that fate for you.’

  ‘Hi, hi,’ said the voice of Bernard Froelich, beaming as he sat down and joined them. ‘Are they treating you well?’

  ‘Why, Dr Froelich,’ said Jochum, ‘I don’t believe we’ve encountered one another since I returned from my European trip. Are you vell?’

  ‘My diseases are under control,’ said Froelich. ‘And how was the European land-mass?’

  ‘Ah, with Europe, who knows? A little tired, perhaps.’

  ‘Not what it was when you were there.’

  ‘No, not what it was at all.’

  ‘Dr Jochum,’ said Froelich, ‘is an émigré from Poland.’

  ‘Ah no, there is no such place,’ said Jochum. ‘I am from America only.’

  ‘That’s right, Jock,’ said Bourbon, looking around the room. ‘Hey, kind of quiet in here today. Wait until the semester starts.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Jochum, ‘I am waiting. I love these students.’

  ‘Especially the ladies,’ said Froelich.

  ‘That’s right,’ said Jochum, ‘I vant to marry every damn one of them.’

  ‘You should, Jock,’ said Bourbon.

  ‘Oh no, von at vonce, please, I am not a young man,’ said Jochum. ‘Actually I often am vondering why I stay single. Perhaps I should find a nice little American vidow off the cover of the Saturday Evening Post to sew all these buttons on. And to mend the socks. Still, as Johannes Brahms, you vill remember, said, “It is impossible to live with a voman together.” ’

  ‘Nonsense, Jock,’ said Bourbon. ‘Every man ought to be married. Gives him a stake in sumpn. My lady’s been with me twenty years now. Ain’t nothin’ like marriage, is there, Mis’ Walker?’

  Walker tried not to notice the glint in Jochum’s eye as he said, non-committally, ‘I suppose not.’

  ‘What about the merits of unwed fornication?’ asked Froelich. ‘That has a lot of rewards and a few less of the penalties.’

  ‘Dr Froelich, I don’t like to hear a married man and a member of the faculty talkin’ that way,’ said Bourbon, ‘and that reminds me ’bout sumpn else I wanted to ask you . . .’

  ‘Yes, fine,’ said Froelich, ‘but do you mind if I take a rain-check? My meal ticket’s standing over there by the dining room waiting for me.’

  ‘These young radicals,’ said Bourbon when Froelich had gone.

  ‘Yes, vell, I must go too,’ said Jochum, standing. ‘Vell, my good friend, it has been good to see you. Now we must arrange to meet. I have a nice little apartment, I do my own cooking, and it is a temptation to extend the range of dishes if I have a visitor. That is why you must come.’

  ‘I’d be glad to,’ said Walker.

  ‘You are vitness, Harris,’ said Jochum, leaving.

  ‘There goes a great scholar. And a great American,’ said Bourbon. ‘Well, now, boy, there are a whole bunch more people I ought to have you meet. Now . . .’

  At this moment there was an interruption in the doorway; a flotilla of men in dark suits, all walking at the same speed and very close to one another, as for protection, came in. At their centre was a craggy-faced, healthy fellow who clearly functioned as their leader. ‘Well, Mis’ Walker, you’re very fortunate,’ said Bourbon, getting up. ‘I want to try to have you meet a very important person indeed. That’s the President himself.’

  ‘Which president?’ asked Walker.

  ‘President Coolidge, President of this U,’ said Bourbon, leading Walker across the room and breaking into the flotilla.

  President Coolidge’s face beamed automatically as Bourbon introduced his guest. ‘Ah yes, Walker, our literary man,’ he said, putting out a hand to crease one of Walker’s affectionately.

  ‘Pleased to meet you,’ said Walker, on his best behaviour.

  ‘Look,’ said the President, making a decision of evident political import, ‘let’s have lunch together.’

  ‘That’s a real honour,’ said Bourbon in Walker’s ear. ‘He don’t even take lunch very often.’

  The cavalcade moved into the dining room, where a waitress rapidly cleared a table. The President seized her arm. ‘I’m going to take a peanut-butter sandwich,’ he said, ‘but I want to see these important men tie into something really good. Steak, fellers? Steak all round.’

  The President sat down and the group sat about him, allotting places according to their relative importance. ‘Here, Walk,’ said the President, patting the seat next to him. ‘You know? As soon as I met you, I thought, here’s a man who has a real resemblance to my favourite Englishman. Know who I’m talking about, Walk?’

  ‘No,’ said Walker, ‘I don’t.’

  ‘The Duke of Windsor. Ever met him?’

  ‘No,’ said Walker.

  ‘I’ve had the honour a couple of times. See the resemblance, Har?’

  ‘No, cain’t say I do,’ said Bourbon, seated on Walker’s other side.

  ‘I see it,’ said one of the other men.

  ‘Let me introduce you to all these good fellows,’ said the President. There was the Dean of Men; the Fundraising Secretary and an assistant described as ‘a computer man’; and there was a reporter from the Party Bugle. ‘We’re very proud,’ said President Coolidge, ‘to have Mr Walker here from England as our Creative Writing Fellow. He’s a fictionalist and is responsible for many very fine books.’

  This said, the President suddenly stood up. The rest of the group rose and Walker made it too, just before the President said ‘Benedictus Benedice’ and sat down again. The steaks had arrived, and a rather regal-looking peanut-butter sandwich, crowned with cress. ‘I guess we have this written down some place, Walk,’ said the President, ‘but tell me – are you from Oxford?’

  ‘No, I’m not, exactly,’ said Walker, exploring a strange fruit compote frozen in gelatine, which had been placed on top of his steak.

  ‘My favourite university,’ said the President, ‘I often wish Benedict Arnold resembled it more.’

  ‘Why?’ said Walker.

  ‘I often think, if we only had a river here . . .’

  ‘You have a lake, haven’t you?’

  ‘Oh yes, a lake. But what’s a lake, compared to a river? If you had to choose, which would you pick?’

  ‘I suppose I might pick a river,’ Walker admitted.

  ‘Spender, Stephen Spender,’ said the President, ‘isn’t he an English writer?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘Friend of yours?’

  ‘Never met him.’

  ‘Nice man. Know Durrell?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh. Snow?’

  ‘No, I don’t know any of that lot,’ said Walker.

  ‘Sir Charles gave a lecture here last year. Very good. Remember that, Har?’

  ‘Yes,’ said Bourbon, ‘very good, but the freshmen didn’t understand it.’

  ‘And where do you come from in England, Walk?’ asked the President. Walker thought a moment and remembered. ‘Nottingham,’ he said.

  ‘Well, that’s a real coincidence. My seven-year-old daughter has a bicycle that was made right there in your city.’

  ‘So have I,’ said Walker.

  ‘A bicycle?’ cried President Coolidge. ‘Well, isn’t that something?’

  ‘Yes, I
go chugging all over the place on it.’

  ‘You artists,’ said President Coolidge.

  ‘I didn’t think there was anything strange about a bicycle.’

  ‘Well, only kids and college students ride bicycles in America. We have a car civilization over here. Drive-in movies, drive-in banks, drive-in drive-ins, you don’t really need to get out for anything.’

  ‘I was only saying to Dr Bourbon how many cars the students seem to have. Particularly sports cars.’

  ‘Well,’ said President Coolidge, flashing his bright smile, ‘you see, Walk, we have one substantial advantage out here. That’s our climate. It happens to be very healthy, like Switzerland. In fact I’m in the habit of calling Party the Geneva of the States; to people who have travelled a lot. We get a good many faculty and students just for that reason. They love our air here. Someone once said it was like – wine.’ The analogy came so freshly from Coolidge’s lips it seemed to have been minted anew.

  The man from the Party Bugle leaned across the table. ‘I’d like to ask you, how’d you like Party? Nice place?’

  ‘It seems to be,’ said Walker.

  ‘You bet it is,’ said the reporter. ‘Find the people warmhearted and kind, the best of American folks?’

  ‘Yes, they seem that way to me.’

  ‘They are, the greatest people on God’s earth. Well, let me ask you this, what brought you over here to Party?’

  ‘I was asked.’

  President Coolidge leaned over and intervened smilingly: ‘Mr Walker is an English angry young man. We had a very interesting lecture on the Angry Young Men. By a Professor L. S. Caton, just passing through, didn’t we, Har?’

  ‘Mostly ’bout Amis, though,’ said Bourbon.

  ‘Well, let me ask you this,’ said the man from the Bugle. ‘You’ve just been described to us, right, as an angry young man. Now, are you still angry now you’re over here?’

  ‘I never was angry,’ said Walker.

  ‘But there’s nothing makes you angry in Party?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘So you find things better here in Party than they are at home; is that right?’

  ‘No, I don’t feel so concerned about the problems of this country because I haven’t been here long enough to know what they are.’

  ‘But there are a lot of things you don’t like about England, right?’

  ‘Yes, some.’

  ‘So there’s no place like home but I like it here better? Well, thank you. You just gave us a real good story.’

  ‘You’re not going to print all that?’ cried Walker. But the President, who had finished his sandwich, got up. ‘Been nice to know you, Walk, see you again. Don’t hurry boys, finish up that good steak . . .’

  ‘Oh, I’m through,’ said the Dean of Men; ‘Me too,’ said the Salaries Accountant. The reporter snapped his notebook shut. A moment later Walker and Bourbon sat alone at the table, surrounded by unfinished beef.

  ‘There goes a great administrator,’ said Dr Bourbon, ‘and a great American.’ Walker, sculpting large pieces out of his steak, said nothing. He was worrying about America, and him in it. He was not used to a public manner, in others or in himself. He had never consciously had a public thought, and when he met men like President Coolidge he thought of them as actors, role-players. But such men seemed naturally at home here; indeed, all around him were people who were inviting him to be an actor himself. The invitation said, Be an Englishman, Be a Writer, Tell Us Your Beliefs, Reveal to Us Your Thoughts. He had a kind of intrinsic scepticism about such things, and it occurred to him to wonder whether this was a personal or a national trait. Was he being inadequate, or was he being English? It was obviously better for him if people believed the latter, and though he wasn’t prepared to make this into a moral excuse he was certainly not prepared to become an American. These doubts about his competence in this new world brought into relief the basic problem, the question of his duties here, and whether he could fulfil them. He decided to ask Bourbon about this. ‘Actually,’ he said, ‘I wonder whether you could tell me about my teaching and so on here?’

  Dr Bourbon screwed up his paper napkin, wiped his moustache with it, then put it into his empty coffee cup, for coffee had been served along with the steak. ‘Surely, Mis’ Walker,’ he said, ‘I been thinkin’ about that. Let’s go back to my office. Talk about these formal things better in my office.’ They walked back across the campus to the temporary structure of the English Building. Outside it, a co-ed on a bicycle nearly ran Walker down; she fell off and smiled brightly at him from the floor. Her skirt was above her knees and Walker looked down into it and said, ‘Hi.’ This made him feel that he was getting closer to American life and he followed Bourbon into his office with less unease. ‘Sid down, Mis’ Walker,’ said Bourbon, lifting a pile of PMLAs, from a chair. Walker sat down and looked around while Bourbon went round to the far side of his big desk. The room was lined with bookcases, holding large American academic volumes and long runs of scholarly periodicals. They were dusty and some were tumbling from the shelves; in two or three cases the runs were supported in position by old boots or items of Mexican pottery. Dr Bourbon sat down in his chair and, opening a bottom desk drawer, put his feet into it. ‘Waal,’ he said, ‘first of all I’d like to welcome you formally to this department. We hope you’ll be happy with us. Lot of people are. Some aren’t. We want you to be one of the happy ones. Waal now’ – he picked up a yellow notepad from amid the desk papers – ‘I’d like you to tell me a few things ’bout yourself. You know about us. You’ll find in all that paper we gave you all there is to know ’bout our courses here and suchlike. Now we have to get to know you. Ph.D?’

  ‘Pardon?’ said Walker.

  ‘Do you have your Ph.D?’

  ‘No.’

  ‘Oh look, I got a file on you here some place.’ Bourbon’s head disappeared below the desk. ‘Done any university teaching before?’ said his voice.

  ‘No, none.’

  ‘Well, let’s see,’ said Bourbon, bringing up a file and opening it. ‘We usually ask our Creative Writing Fellow to do six hours a week. That don’t seem too much to you, does it?’

  To Walker, who had nothing to compare it with, it seemed unbelievably pleasant, and he said, ‘No.’

  ‘We usually expect him to take one graduate course and one undergraduate course in creative writing, they meet twice a week, and one other course. We ought to talk about the other course . . .’

  ‘What are the creative writing courses like here?’ asked Walker.

  ‘The usual kind of thing.’

  ‘What’s the usual kind of thing?’

  ‘You ain’t done this kind of thing before?’

  ‘No, we don’t have creative writing, as such, in English universities.’

  ‘Oh, that’s right,’ said Bourbon. ‘Course I was in England, I told you. Well, the graduate course is writing pomes and novels. Plays are Drama and Theatre Arts; you don’t touch plays. Pomes, well, tell ’em how to write pomes. Novels, well, construction and plottin’ and characterization and thematic unity or design and keepin’ the reader interested. Tell them what James said. Tell them what Wolfe said. Show the kids how you do things. We give an MA in creative writin’ here. That means they can write a novel or book of pomes in partial fulfilment. Tell them about that. You’ll find we got some good kids here. Make ’em great, Mis’ Walker, make ’em great.’

  ‘Just in the graduate course?’

  ‘Well, undergraduates, you have to go more careful there,’ said Bourbon, taking out his pipe and lighting it. Blossoms of smoke grew around his head. In the next office the typewriters of the secretaries clacked. ‘That’s more manuscript mechanics and typin’ and the blessin’ of creativity. Then a bit later in the year get them writin’ short stories and pomes. That’s the way it’s been done in the past. But those are your courses, Mis’ Walker. We want you to give what you want to give. Now there’s one other thing, we usually ask our creative writer to give a
public lecture to folks, folks from the university and outside it, durin’ the first semester. You’ll see some posters up about it if you look around. We didn’t trouble you for a subject, so we took the liberty of calling it “The Writer’s Dilemma”. So you can talk on anythin’.’

  ‘Will there be a lot of people?’

  ‘Well, Mis’ Walker, you’re a good writer, you’ve got a lot of press publicity locally since we appointed you, you should get maybe a thousand people. It’s an occasion we all look forward to. So you might be thinking about that. And now that leaves us with the other course for the year. Lot of writers in the past have taken a course on a specialty, but we talked this over in the department, Mis’ Walker, and we wondered whether you’d care to do a Comp course. We like to give everyone in the faculty an experience of Comp.’

  ‘That’s Reading, Writing, Speaking and Listening?’

  ‘Yeah, it’s one of the most valuable services we do here. Lot of these kids come here, Mis’ Walker, from all kinds of little red schoolhouses all over the state. We’re financed in part from state funds, that’s people’s money, and we don’t impose strict entrance requirements on in-state students. Fact is, almost any student who has the gumption to actually find out where the U is is admitted. Well, I’ll tell you, some of these kids, I mean they’re all good kids, but they’ve not had the schoolin’. Some of ’em can hardly write their names in the dust with a stick. That means if they’re going to get any benefit out of a U at all, and by that I mean intellectual benefit, they’ve got to be taught to communicate. So here in the English Dep. we run these courses for entering freshmen, tellin’ the kids how to talk and write and pass messages on and avoid parkin’ where it says “No Parkin’”. It’s a very valuable function for English in the technological world of today, and I don’t mind tellin’ you, Mis’ Walker, it’s sometimes the only way we have of presentin’ English as a university subject at all to the other departments like Science and Business. A lot of folks who come here from Europe think that literature has a kind of status in its own right, but I don’t mind admittin’ to you I think they got a case, but it ain’t an easy case to present always. But tell the U that you’re teachin’ scientists to talk to one another and teachin’ business majors to write memos and reports and they listen to you, because they know that’s important. So I figured I’d put you down for two hours a week of Comp, because you ought to see that course and because anyway a couple of graduate students from out east we hired got theirselves fixed up elsewhere and I got to assign eight sections to regular faculty. I think you’re goin’ to find that a fascinatin’ course, Mis’ Walker. Teachin’ the comma and all.’