Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Well, thank you very much,’ said Walker, ‘I’ll have to think about it again. It seems an equivocal position.’

  ‘Waal,’ said Bourbon, ‘I guess Britain and the States are goin’ to see pretty much eye to eye for the rest of the academic year. Might as well sign.’

  ‘I’ll see,’ said Walker.

  They walked back inside. Elderly faculty wives were making gracious rounds among the graduate students, and a fairly rigid class system was operating. The graduates all seemed rather subdued by the formalities of the occasion, but there was considerable delight when Hamish Wagner, pouring a bagful of ice into the punchbowl, got into difficulties – the ice exploded upward in a high pillar of smoke, scattering a fine spray over the people nearby.

  ‘Mighty violent ice, that,’ said Bourbon, waving ineffectually at the smoke cloud.

  ‘I got dry ice,’ said Crispin, leaning against the wall and cackling with laughter, ‘the kind they use for starting rainstorms.’ Harris Bourbon shook his head sadly and the graduate students poked one another and hid suppressed mirth. Miss Handlin took it rather differently, however.

  ‘Oh, wasn’t that ecstatic?’ she said to Walker. ‘Did you ever see anything so beautiful? I guess that’s one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. Doesn’t it make you want to take your clothes off?’

  ‘It certainly does,’ said Walker politely.

  On the next evening Walker took the crosstown bus, found out where to deposit his fare, and sat on the bench, watching Party unroll through the windows, until the driver said, ‘Here’s where you want out.’ Dr Jochum lived in a part of town that Walker had never visited and never really knew about; it was composed of extravagant Gothic houses in wood, and was a relic of the rich mining days when Party felt confident about itself. The houses were in small glades of trees and had big lawns; they were entered deviously, through paths and fences and over grass sections. The house where Jochum roomed was distinguished by onion domes on the roof, so that it looked like a smaller version of the Kremlin, and by doors at all levels, with steps up to them and steps down to them. Walker found the right door, then the right bell. Jochum appeared instantaneously, beaming, wearing shorts, a gay shirt, and moccasin shoes. ‘A big welcome here,’ he said. ‘Now we must go carefully up these stairs.’ He led the way up a tortured, big-banistered staircase to a tiny room in the roof; it had wooden walls, a high bed in the centre, and at one end, in a gable window, two chairs and a maple table. ‘Please take off your jacket, I vill hang it carefully in the closet, and then sit down,’ said Jochum. ‘Then I vill serve you first some tea. It was with tea that we first met each other, do you recall?’

  ‘Yes, I do,’ said Walker.

  ‘One moment,’ said Jochum, ‘I vill be back. In the meantime here is a newspaper to read.’

  But before Walker had even unfolded the Bugle Jochum was back with a tray. ‘Vell,’ he said, ‘has the desert worked? Have you found the lost character?’

  ‘I think I’m finding it.’

  ‘How does it look?’

  ‘Oh, pretty bad.’

  ‘Vell, that at least is interesting. Most people find they haven’t got any at all. Please eat while we are talking.’

  ‘Thank you.’

  ‘See, I am eating too. Of course, character is not a fashionable concept. Now we think that we act because our family situation was so, because our historical location is so, because we are sailing with the tide of history, or because it has abandoned us as reactionary deviants. Today all our actions are really performed by our grandfathers; we take no responsibility, like the owners of umbrella stands in hotels. So, you see, nobody believes really in people any more. People, vell, they are a nineteenth-century concept. Now man is a focus of forces.’

  ‘Well, I feel that’s true,’ said Walker. ‘I haven’t succeeded in finding much self yet . . . as you warned me I wouldn’t.’

  ‘Ah vell, what do you expect? The good ship you sail in is called Eclectica; you are blown about by the winds as they come. You have no idea how to conduct yourself, so you make a virtue of whim. That is quite natural.’

  ‘Yes,’ said Walker, eating a large sandwich filled with tuna-fish. ‘But that can be a nice mode of being.’

  ‘Oh yes, but such an atomized one. The Marxists always tell that the nineteenth century was the age of atomized behaviour. Individualism. As I am telling my classes always, it was not so. Those were the great days of being the grand carnival of existence. And why? Because everyone had a large piece of society in his head when he was six months old, and a vast ethical system when he was adult. That is why there was Freud; everyone thinks that Freud knew about insides and Marx about society, but it was the good Sigmund that knew about society. It starts here, in the head.’ Jochum rapped hard with his fist on his skull.

  ‘Under the pressure of the facts,’ said Walker. ‘I mean, look how the world is going. Look at this vast urbanized and technologized mass-society that we are going to have to live with if we don’t evade the issue – as I do. The foulness of that life. That’s the future America is looking so brightly towards. I can’t help thinking that England’s wise in politely pretending that it can’t really exist.’

  ‘You are telling me that our time is one when we are learning how to live worse. Vell, I am telling that to you.’

  ‘But how does one be a man among men now?’

  ‘Ah, there is the question. You want me to give you ethics. But you must find them for yourself.’

  ‘But as you were saying, there seem very few around. The moral space in our lives seems to be shrinking fast.’

  ‘That’s so. And so we invite in politics. The ethics of politics tells: eliminate these, kill those, declare war, start revolutions. It drives out the ethics of personal living, of being a person, which tells: be kind, respect others, do good things. So I like your search. You are foolish, my friend, and you vill always do silly things. But I am admiring you a good deal. More tea for you?’

  ‘Thank you,’ said Walker, holding out his cup. ‘Actually it all grows more difficult. I feel very burdened just at the moment.’

  ‘Of course, ever since I have known you on that ship you have been so. Vell, let me guess. You are in love with fifteen vomen at one time, and now they are all pregnant and vish to marry you.’

  ‘Close,’ said Walker. ‘But not quite. I’m trying to divorce my wife.’

  ‘Vell, no doubt this is a more stupid thing than all the rest, but I vill assume there is some special Walker sense to it.’

  ‘I want to be sure I’m doing right, you see.’

  ‘Oh, you are not, but no matter.’

  ‘I don’t want to hurt her, you know.’ He felt in his pocket for a letter which had come that morning, a reply to the letter he had finished and sent, asking for his freedom. Elaine said, ‘You ask me to give you your freedom. But I haven’t got your freedom, Jim. I don’t remember ever seeing it. I think you must have taken it with you – do look through all your things. If it’s not there, I don’t think you ever had it. You can do what you want; you always could. You owe some things to me, but they’re not claimed very often. No, it’s not your freedom that’s missing, really, but your love. I think you ought to have a look for that too, because I think you’ll find it. And if it’s not over there, shouldn’t you come back home and look before you decide on this? I think that would be much better than coming back to me in a couple of years and saying it was a terrible mistake. And you know you’re quite capable of doing that.’ Walker handed the letter to Jochum; Jochum took out some old, wire-framed spectacles to read it. ‘Vell, are you capable?’ asked Jochum, when he had finished.

  ‘I suppose so. It depends on whether I go on finding what I think I’m looking for.’

  Jochum looked at the letter again and said, ‘I’m afraid it is difficult. I think she loves you.’

  ‘Oh, she does.’

  ‘And you do not love her.’

  ‘Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure wha
t it feels like, not sure what the word means.’

  ‘Ah, I understand,’ said Jochum. ‘Love is an emotion that other people feel towards you.’

  ‘No, not that. It’s just that my loyalties have changed. My mind has gone another way. I’m committed to things she doesn’t share. She holds me back from them. And in a way I’ve gone beyond that kind of affection.’

  ‘Oh yes, the cruelty of the writer. He must sacrifice his loved ones to write the better about love. It is a very old story.’

  ‘Well, it is like that, yes. I’ve grown a lot here. I’m moving towards things I’ve long missed. I think I’m moving towards being a real writer, a real artist. That means cutting some ropes, untying oneself from the shore.’

  ‘You want to marry someone else?’

  ‘No, it’s divorce, not marriage, I’m on with. I want to marry the universe.’

  ‘Ah, those old romantic weddings. The trouble with the universe is that it is so unfaithful. It runs around with so many people.’

  ‘But you see what I mean?’

  ‘No,’ said Jochum, ‘I don’t see. I think you are mad as a hatter.’

  ‘I am?’ asked Walker, looking pleased.

  ‘We all are, but it is always a good lesson to look hard at the victims who suffer by your ideology.’

  ‘There are always victims.’

  ‘Oh, I know, I am a victim from way back, that is why I am an exile. However, I must retire to the kitchen. Now I become a hausfrau. Read please the newspaper.’

  Walker picked up the Party Bugle, and found in it, again, his own name. ‘Angry young man author James Walker, presently visiting BAU from England, lectures Wednesday, December 1, on The Writer’s Dilemma. Walker, one of Britain’s leading authors, earlier picked out Party as a town of “real nice people”, and said he preferred it to England. Maybe that’s Mr Walker’s dilemma.’

  ‘Did you see this?’ said Walker, angrily marching into the kitchen with the paragraph.

  ‘Ah, yes, I see you know how to please the press.’

  ‘Those aren’t my views.’

  ‘Of course not.’

  ‘And I didn’t say that.’

  ‘It is simply what you are expected to say. No one believes it, but it is nice to think that one day someone might really say such a thing. Now I would say it and mean it, but I am never asked.’

  ‘Say it and mean it?’

  ‘Of course,’ said Jochum, throwing some lentils into a pan, ‘I am a loyalist. This is the only country, the only town, I have. I love it much more than the citizens. I only see its virtues.’

  ‘I meant to ask you,’ said Walker, ‘did you have to sign a loyalty oath when you came? As a foreigner?’

  ‘I signed such an oath, but I am not a foreigner.’

  ‘You didn’t complain?’

  ‘I was pleased to sign it. This is what I am telling. I feel very loyal here.’

  ‘It offends me,’ said Walker.

  ‘Well, of course, you are a liberal.’

  ‘And a foreigner.’

  ‘But I thought that you told me you had discounted those old loyalties. You had cut the ropes.’

  ‘I have.’

  ‘Ah, you want to be a loyalist of nowhere. I want to be a loyalist of somewhere.’

  ‘A loyalist of the imagination,’ said Walker.

  ‘Vell, I hope you vill not make a cause of this. There are many people on campus who would be only too happy to use you to further their ends.’

  ‘Mightn’t they be good ends?’

  ‘Some of them.’

  ‘I have a taste for preserving freedom, because I enjoy it so much myself.’

  ‘Since I came here for freedom,’ said Jochum, ‘I have the same taste. On this we agree.’

  ‘But isn’t prescribing what we teach – and doesn’t the loyalty oath mean that? – a limitation of freedom?’

  ‘How does it prescribe what you teach?’

  ‘Well, how does one define what contributes to the overthrow of the American government? Supposing I praise the British National Health Service in class? Isn’t that menacing to the government, in a sense? I’m told there are people who think it is.’

  ‘I have never understood that the misuse of a device means that we should eliminate the device, only the misuse.’

  ‘But the device is a symptom of the prevalence of the misuse.’

  ‘Ah, now I agree. But you vill find that American universities are very vulnerable. Someone once defined liberals as people who embrace their destroyers. I think protected democracy is proper in a world where there are many destroyers. But please, why do we talk of these things on a pleasant evening?’

  ‘I have to decide what to do about the oath,’ said Walker.

  ‘Vell, I can offer a solution. I believe in personal solutions and here is one. Do not sign it – that vill ease your conscience – and hope that the filing system in the Administration Building is so terrible that nobody vill know.’

  ‘I’ve already raised the matter with Dr Bourbon.’

  ‘Even so.’

  ‘It’s a thought, a nice thought.’

  ‘Just a friendly suggestion,’ said Jochum, looking like a kind father as he beamed at Walker. Walker beamed back and sucked in the thick vegetable smell that rose from the pot Jochum was stirring. He was looking forward to a real, European meal.

  Walker spent most of the next week writing his lecture on The Writer’s Dilemma. His writer’s dilemma was that he couldn’t think of anything to say. One day, when he was sitting in his office, late in the evening, when the rest of his colleagues who shared it with him had gone home, he was interrupted; Dr Bourbon had heard him typing and put his head in. ‘Hi, boy,’ he said, stuffing threads of tobacco into his pipe, and looking round to see whether Walker was alone. ‘Just come in to tell you President Coolidge is givin’ a little reception before yore lecture next Wednesday. ’Bout six. Drinks and a buffet. It’s a real honour, boy.’

  ‘I hope I finish writing it in time,’ said Walker.

  ‘That it? Well, I won’t look. Let it surprise me.’

  ‘It may,’ said Walker, smiling.

  ‘Be a lot of very important people there. The President and his wife; in fact the President may introduce you. Real honour. Then some of the state officials may come down, there’s an athletic meeting that afternoon. Be a good turn-out from the faculty, I guess. Thought I’d better warn you case you was thinkin’ of makin’ it informal. Better make it formal. Press’ll be there. Guess they’ll send a man down from the Dimity Gazette. That’s the biggest paper in the state. Dimity’s the state capital. I’d stick in some extra carbons so they can have copies of the text. These pressmen, they’re nice fellows, but they don’t all write shorthand very good.’

  ‘I know,’ said Walker, thinking of his recent press experiences.

  ‘I look forward to it, Mis’ Walker,’ said Bourbon, nodding and going out.

  Walker didn’t. On the evening of the lecture it rained, the mountains went from view; and the trees were wet and fragrant as Walker set out in his mackintosh to the President’s House, or rather mansion, a large white property in the colonial manner hidden behind trees on a corner of the campus. Here President Coolidge and his wife, a handsome woman in a flame-red dress, stood formally just inside the door, shaking hands with the entrants. Two co-eds, in white blouses and black skirts, took the coats of the guests – none of them wet save for Walker’s – and hung them on racks on the porch.

  ‘Nice to see you, Walk,’ said the President, crinkling his smile, ‘you’re our guest of honour tonight.’ He put his hand on his wife’s arm – she was talking to Harris Bourbon, who looked ill at ease in a vast black area of dinner jacket – and said, ‘You must meet our guest of honour, Hetty.’

  ‘Oh, the great man himself,’ said the President’s wife, turning, ‘I’ve heard so much . . .’

  ‘The students really love this man,’ said Bourbon. ‘Why, I was talkin’ to Miss Handlin, she’s wi
ld about you, Mis’ Walker.’ Two male students, also in white shirts and black flannels, a martini man and a Manhattan man, approached simultaneously with trays of drinks. Bourbon ushered Walker forward into the big, elegantly furnished room, a concord of decoration, obviously done by a designer with a taste for big hangings and Aztec masks. Walker found here a number of his colleagues – Evadne Heilman, big and beaming, a loose-fitting woman in a tight-fitting dress; and Bernard Froelich, in a dark Ivy League suit; and Hamish Wagner, red-haired and poised to say ‘Pip pip.’ ‘I got some new people you ought to know,’ said Bourbon, introducing him to Selena May Sugar (‘she’s one of the committee brung you here’), a local novelist, a moustachioed man clearly modelled on Mark Twain (‘writes about the west – begins with the creakin’ of the covered wagons and ends with the discovery of oil’), two reporters from Dimity (‘bastions of the press’), and the Mayor of Party, a dapper little man in a string tie and a lightweight suit with gold threads shining in it. ‘Howdy, sir,’ said the Mayor. ‘We’re real glad to know you like it here. We do.’

  Walker had been feeling nervous all week; now he felt virtually hysterical. His speech, under his arm in a blue folder he had bought for ten cents from the college bookstore, seemed utter nonsense to him. He drank three martinis in quick succession, and talked to the Mayor about the history of Party. ‘My granddaddy and grandmaw came out here in a covered wagon, to settle. Grandmaw still talks about it. Recollects coming out here in a covered dish. Her mind’s going a little. Lot of people in town who came out that way. You can still smell the frontier here. There were people coming through here still looking for gold when I was a boy.’ The President interrupted to ask Walker to partake of a buffet supper. At the long cloth-covered table where the morsels were laid out, Walker found himself in line with Hamish Wagner. ‘Pip pip, old boy,’ said Hamish.