Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ said Froelich, ‘wait until later in the year. You’ll feel a really fulfilled person when you call up one of your students on the telephone, to ask her for a date or something, and she answers: “This is she speaking.” That’s the day when it all comes right.’

  ‘But is that teaching? Is that the right relationship between mentor and . . .?’

  ‘Mented?’ asked Froelich.

  ‘Go out into the world and do what you will, so long as you use collective nouns correctly, is that what we say?’ asked Walker.

  ‘What else?’

  ‘Remember there used once to be a thing called morals? Does that come into it at all?’

  ‘Now morals,’ said Froelich, ‘well, there, you must wait and see.’

  ‘I know I shouldn’t pine like this,’ said Walker. ‘After all, this is such a challenge, a wide-open country. Responsibility or non-responsibility – you can choose. It’s a moral supermarket. The trouble is I get so confused, I decide to buy nothing at all.’

  ‘You need consumer advice,’ said Froelich. ‘And that’s what I’m here for.’

  ‘I’ll remember,’ said Walker.

  ‘We’ll have you making the right choices even if we have to make them for you. Well, I’ve got another bunch of peons coming in. You’ll find the office is a real social centre.’

  They went out of the faculty lounge and into the English Office, where one of the secretaries looked up at them and smiled. ‘Hi, baby,’ said Froelich, ‘what’s a crummy girl like you doing working in a beautiful joint like this?’

  ‘I don’t think that’s very funny, Dr Froelich,’ said the girl.

  ‘Oh,’ said Froelich, ‘I’m looking for a parcel. I’m expecting the proofs of my Plight book.’

  ‘No parcel here,’ said the secretary. The connecting door to Bourbon’s office opened, and Bourbon put his head out.

  ‘Oh, Bernard, could you come in a moment? Want to ask you ’bout a little matter . . .’

  ‘Can it wait, Harris? I’ve got about fifteen kids out there waiting for conferences. Just came in to pick up some proofs.’

  ‘Oh, well,’ said Bourbon resignedly, ‘later, maybe. Glad to know you’re publishin’, boy. Only way to get on in this academic rat-race.’

  ‘That’s right, Harris,’ said Froelich, hurrying out of the door.

  Walker, standing in front of the letter pigeonholes, found his name at last. There were four letters. One, from Elaine, had been posted before the telegram. It reminded him about his underpants, and said it had rained in Nottingham, and told how the librarian downstairs had come up twice to unstop the sink in the kitchen. ‘I do wish these nine months would hurry up and go away, because I miss you,’ the letter ended. The second, from New York, contained a file card. On it, in rather unformed handwriting, was inscribed a quotation: ‘Fools and young men prate about everything being possible for a man. That, however, is a great error. Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is not possible. This impossible, however, the knight makes possible by expressing it spiritually, but he expresses it spiritually by waiving his claim to it. The wish which would carry him out into reality, but was wrecked upon the impossibility, is now bent inward, but it is not therefore lost, neither is it forgotten. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.’ Underneath was written: ‘I was sorry we missed in NY. So – come again. On the wall of the women’s john at a bar in the Village: If you love life, despicable is thy name. How’s the co-ordination? Julie.’ The third letter, from St Louis, said, ‘Isn’t it a funny country? I’m loving it though. And one has so much money. Are you going to travel? I am, and don’t be at all surprised to see me descend on you. I can offer, if you come to St Louis, a bed-settee in the living room, all quite respectable. You’re a nice boy, and I remember you well. Remember me. Love, Fern Marrow.’ The fourth letter said, ‘Dear Friend: I am giving on the evening of next Thursday, at 7 p.m. (19:00), a small dinner party, and at this party you are the guest of honour. Since you will be the only guest, you will not, I think, be able to plead excuses of “previous engagements”. The proceeding for arrival here is so: take westwards the crosstown bus on Main and request to descend at Mountview. Here is a fire-hydrant. From here walk north on Mountview one block. You cannot fail to observe this house. It is really the house in which the elves make those toys for Santa Claus. There is a bell on the doorpost and against it my name. F. Jochum.’ Walker read all the letters blandly, and felt free of all their claims. He put them in his pocket and went to finish the preparation of his class.

  On the day after, the teaching programme began. The wooden hut occupied by the English Department was next to one of the main paths that led across the campus, so that from their offices the members of the faculty could see the co-eds flouncing past the windows, notebooks in their arms, on their way from class to class. On fine days they wore neat blouses and skirts, tight at the rump, or else cut-off jeans with the Greek letters of their sororities painted in white across their behinds; on wet ones they wore slickers in red and blue and yellow or, if it was cold, quilted or fur-lined jackets with hoods. The men wore denims and shirts, or sweaters with the university crest across the bosom. They were a bright sight, and Walker spent a good deal of time peering through the fly-screens on his windows at this campus display. It took place every hour, when the bell rang, the floors boomed, and classes emptied out. The faculty dashed in and out of their offices, taking off and putting on their jackets, servicing the many needs of the students. You could see them as you walked down the corridors, teaching affably, the door open, their voices genial from the podium. The teaching associates, who taught only the composition classes and were usually working for graduate degrees as well, were packed six or eight to an office and could be seen there, with the doors again open, marking themes, preparing classes, writing novels, smoking and occasionally eating lunch. All these people were mentors for Walker in the conduct of his academic life, these men of abstract ideas who read Shakespeare in the morning and played with a football on the grass in the afternoon. It seemed hard to know where they got their inspiration from, why they went on being wise men at all, and it was only from a kind of intellectual optimism that Walker sensed in the American air, a fondness for discovery and growth, that he could relate all the varied parts of them together. They were neither convincingly intellectual nor convincingly philistine; they mixed the materialist and the aesthetic approaches; they were coarse where they might be sensitive and sensitive where they might be coarse.

  From his own classes, Walker began to learn. He suspected that he ran them rather differently from the other teachers; for instance, he was always careful to shut the door. He taught, too, in an atmosphere of amiable mystery, unsure about his standards, unsure about his function, unsure even whether his words were being understood or not. The composition class was his most difficult one. It met twice a week in the Chemistry Building, opulent new premises which lay about a half a mile away from the English Department, and involved him in a long walk on which he occasionally got lost completely. The classes were held in a large amphitheatre with a sink and some gas-taps on the teacher’s desk. When he leaned forward excitedly he fell forward into the sink, and on occasions when he grew abstract he was apt to play with the gas-taps and turn them on. The class consisted largely of beautiful girls, all about eighteen, splendidly made up; they sat in the front rows, close to him, exposing beautiful legs, and distracting him with intense perfumes. The men sat separately, on the other side of the aisle, occasionally throwing pieces of paper at the girls. One of them, a big bulky youth with fair hair in a crew-cut, put his feet up on Walker’s desk. All of them appeared to write down everything he said. On the first day he had told them his name – they wrote that down – and had written on the blackboard the number of his office in the English Department. ‘Where is the English Department?’ asked one of the girls, all of whom had started to knit. It was impossible for Wal
ker to answer this and he had to turn for help to others in the class. Presently another girl asked him where he was from, and a boy had asked about the supposed stodginess of English women, and Walker found himself talking about his wife and his sexual habits before marriage and the way in which his parents had brought him up. It had gone on this way ever since. The class seemed to like him, and he liked them. Often he suspected that they only understood a few words of what he was saying, because of his accent, but they were extremely jolly with him and told him a great deal about the dating system. One of the girls offered to knit him a sweater; he felt that, there, he was well on the way to acceptance.

  The creative writing classes were simpler but not less challenging. They met in the seminar rooms in the English Building in an atmosphere of pleasant informality. The class members sat round the oblong table, smoking, and reading things they had written, or asking questions about submitting manuscripts and whether they should send self-addressed envelopes or not. The graduate class was the more demanding, because it lasted for two hours and because many of the students were his fellow teachers in the composition course. They were also intense and bright. There were extravagant Emersonians in white socks who wished to recreate in fiction all of human history and human knowledge; there were strange Southern girls who said little but occasionally sketched out plots for stories about extravagant rapes on poor white smallholdings; there was Miss Handlin, the girl whom Walker had met on his first day in Party, who was keeping a visionary spiritual diary about the way she was trying to attain progression through hallucination. The practical, finite pitch of Walker’s thoughts embarrassed him as he discovered that his students were all romantics; they tapped their cigarettes on the old tins used as ashtrays in the seminar room and asked, ‘Well, Mr Walker, what is truth?’ or ‘What does it feel like to die?’ or ‘Where are we going, in this world of ours?’

  ‘You’re a writer, Mr Walker, so you have to tell us the truth that nobody else tells us,’ Miss Handlin said in the first class. Walker wriggled and went red. ‘You must have a vision of the world; tell us what it is,’ she went on. Walker groped to find it and got nowhere. The classes went on and he began to doubt. Was he a writer at all? Wasn’t he a half-writer, a man who had chanced into this as he might have gone into any profession, a man without dedication or intensity? Had he ever given anything to the imagination? Did he take chances, believe in it as a force? Where and how did literature flow into him, and in what way did it seed or grow? The class pushed him and pressed him and groped with him, and watched to see his spirit stir. He was on the way, though, and he knew it. The provinces, and domesticity, and the home he had left behind, had all lost their grip on him. At night he sat in his room and watched the mountains, while oriental students played ritual basketball in their shorts below his window, and tried to grasp at infinities, at the unethical and irrational immensities that would give him the vastness of spirit he craved. America seemed, through these students, the world of freedom and aspiration he had hoped for it to be. Miss Handlin’s diary, headed with a phrase of Santayana, ‘The imagination, therefore, must furnish to religion and to metaphysics those large ideas tinctured with passion, those supersensible forms shrouded in awe, in which alone a mind of great sweep and vitality can find its congenial objects,’ set the pace of the class. She read from it her visions, achieved through the stimulus of drugs, occasional fornication, and contemplation of nature, keeping the class active in interpretation and Walker alive in his hope that romanticism was not, then, exhausted.

  Amid the finite and the diurnal, Walker and his kindred souls wrestled onward, for two hours a week. There was a gay antinomianism about the graduate students, too, and he spent long evenings with them in their rooms in the Graduate Halls, listening to records of Lotte Lenya, eating pretzels, then driving up to parties in the canyon, where the air was sulphurated with sexuality and everyone drank Californian wine. On Friday nights, when the students swarmed out to drive-ins and bars to celebrate date night, they drove around town looking for people giving parties, calling on the married graduates and the younger faculty people to find out what was swinging. It was a world of intellectual vagabonds, sleepers on other people’s couches, and Walker developed a taste for and a loyalty to it all. The graduate students and younger faculty members, who had all spent long years in college, also had an intellectual style Walker envied. They had vast terminologies for talking about literature, and freely used words Walker had never before heard in anyone’s speech vocabulary – mimesis, epistemology, mythopoeic. They had strong specialisms which they talked about in detail – a strong Shelley group banded together in the faculty lounge to talk about Epipsychidion over cups of Maxwell House – and Walker was struck by their real concern with ideas. Walker got on with all these well, and his only difficult encounters were with Hamish Wagner, who always prefaced any conversation with him with the phrase ‘Pip pip, old boy’ and saw him as a stage Englishman, and some of the older faculty members who had spent time in Europe and for whom he had a glow; they were vastly disappointed when he set aside his tweeds on purchasing a seersucker suit in blue and white stripe that made him look like a sunshade. People regularly came into his office, where he sat giving student consultations and marking papers, to talk to him. It was a good world for growing in.

  One evening, at the end of the second week of the semester, Dr Bourbon invited all the faculty and graduate students to his house, in order to introduce them to one another. There were two hundred of them, and they drove out in packed cars to the ranch house. In the doorway Bourbon and Hamish Wagner, Head of Composition, stood, pinning tags on lapels, giving the wearer’s name, degrees, and a short list of his publications. Inside, the house where Walker had stayed was transformed. The two hundred filled it; people swayed back and forth in eddies. A Spenser specialist stood outside on the patio to prevent people falling into the swimming pool, and a Swinburne man was stationed by the barbecue pit to stop people from skewering themselves on the spit. The realization that their colleagues were so many in number brought a return of the depression that everyone had felt on the first day; people went about, one eye low down, reading the tags on lapels. Some of the women looked rather red. Walker got himself a drink and hid in one corner of the room, talking to Cindy Handlin. ‘I’ve just been reading The Magic Mountain,’ said Miss Handlin.

  ‘Ah, yes,’ said Walker, ‘a splendid book.’

  ‘Isn’t it good? Isn’t it?’ said Miss Handlin. ‘Didn’t it just give you an orgasm?’

  ‘Well, it didn’t actually,’ said Walker, ‘but I’ll look at it again.’

  ‘Oh, do,’ said Miss Handlin.

  Across the room, Hamish Wagner asked for silence and said that Dr Bourbon was going to speak. The crowd all sat down tailor-fashion on the floor, and Bourbon appeared in the serving hatch, a curiously effective podium. His head and shoulders stuck through, his moustache catching the light. He smiled and said, ‘First of all I just want to say “Howdy” to everybody, ole friends and new ones.’ A few people said ‘Howdy’ back at him. ‘Folks,’ he went on, ‘in these times a lot of people don’t realize how important English is. Now we know that, that’s why we’re all here, teachin’ and all, but we’ve got to convince these kids of the importance of English. I want you to think that after a year these kids will go away and say, “Boy, that was a great teacher I had there in Comp., or World Lit. Maybe I’ll take some courses in Lit. next year.” Teach ’em right, and these kids will come back for more.’ Bourbon then went on to define some of the fundamental axioms of teaching as he saw it: avoid intellectual arrogance, never criticize another teacher to a student, don’t smoke in the corridors of wooden buildings. Gifts of money should not be accepted in exchange for favours. Teachers should not light out for the West Coast on a two-week razzle without arranging for someone to meet their classes. If teachers were attacked by a member, or members, of their class, they should report it to the Dean of Studies, even if they were not wounded. ‘Now,
’ he went on, ‘I want you all to introduce yourselves to one another. I’d like us to get up in alphabetical order and announce our names, our degrees, and our list of publications.’ People began to stand up and testify, as Bourbon read out their names. When he got round to Walker he rose sheepishly and mentioned his degree. ‘A special welcome to Mis’ Walker from England,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘He’s our creative writin’ fellow and he’s published some fine novels. Tell them the names of your novels, Mis’ Walker, so they can go right out and order them.’ Walker gave the titles of his novels and was rewarded with a small round of applause.

  Afterwards Walker took his drink out into the patio and stood in the darkness looking out over the lights of Party, shining through the trees. It was neat and small and comforting, and after the ceremonial of acceptance Walker felt himself a citizen, an approved man of mind, a spoke in the cycle of learning. He was of this élite, and it had accepted him. An accredited teacher, he felt his loyalties growing to include these visionary souls. They were of one body; materialists of grammar, but on the path to higher things. Then he heard someone in the darkness behind him, blundering through a bush, and Dr Bourbon appeared by his side.

  ‘Shoot,’ he said, wiping his brow. ‘Have to git a bigger house, if the department keeps on expandin’.’

  ‘It’s an enormous party,’ said Walker.

  ‘Yip,’ said Bourbon, ‘they’ve drunk all my supplies. Had to send Crispin out for some more ice. Well, must git back in there, but I just wanted to tell you somethin’. I wrote a memorandum to the President ’bout the loyalty oath business. Got a reply today. Said all members of staff had to sign it, accordin’ to state law. But he says if the British government did require you to overthrow the American government you’d be covered under international law. He looked it up.’