Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  Walker said nothing, but put on his belted raincoat and set off for his trek across campus. Froelich, whose composition class was in a closer building, was back in his room to see Walker’s reappearance. He was evidently in a mood of increased dejection. It emerged that one of the students had asked him if England was a communist country, and when he turned round to write on the blackboard, halfway through the class, he had found that someone had chalked on it, ‘If you don’t like it here, why don’t you go back to where you came from?’ Walker had marked the grammar of this, finally giving it an F for the repeated preposition, but his heart had not been in it.

  ‘One of the great mottoes of American democracy, and you give it an F,’ said Luther Stewart.

  ‘It doesn’t mean anything,’ said Froelich.

  Walker, swirling his chair round on its centre stalk, said, ‘How will I know when something means something? When I get hit on the head with a stick?’

  ‘Easy, buddy, you’re getting all tensed up,’ said Froelich.

  ‘Look, I think the best thing for your comfort and protection would be if you came over and stayed at my place a few days. No one need know where you are. You can just hole up until this thing works itself out. It’s just starting, now. Soon it’s really going to move.’

  There was yet another knock on the door, and Froelich went to open it. In the corridor stood two male campus nonconformists, both wearing sunglasses, beards, and sweaters and Levi’s. ‘We’re looking for Mr Walker,’ they said, ‘is he around?’

  ‘Why do you want him?’ asked Froelich.

  ‘We just want to shake him by the hand and tell him he’s real turned on.’

  ‘Also to invite him to a party,’ said the other beat.

  ‘Come on in, then,’ said Froelich, ‘there he is.’ The two men went and stood before Walker, whose head was drooping further, and he gave each of them a limp hand to shake.

  ‘Hi, James, real glad to know you,’ said one of them. ‘We just wanted to apologize for this sick society we have here, and thank you, for, you know, being a saint.’

  ‘That’s right,’ said the other. ‘There’s a party tonight we’d like you to come to. A real scene. There’ll be a like turned on crowd there, and they’re all wanting to meet you. A whole lot of girls, real sweet chicks. And we’ll be smoking, too.’

  ‘Thank you very much,’ said Walker, ‘but I don’t feel up to a party at the moment.’

  ‘Sure, you go,’ said Froelich, ‘I’ll drive you round there.’

  ‘No,’ said Walker, ‘another time.’

  ‘Okay, that’s a date,’ said the beat, ‘see you somewhere.’

  Froelich felt a sincere desire to jolly Walker back into emotional health. ‘You should have gone there, man,’ he said. ‘I tell you, all the real people round this place are looking for victims like you. You don’t come so easy; you fill a real need. You stand for truth suffering against ignorance for a whole bunch of folk on this campus.’

  ‘Do I?’ said Walker.

  ‘Yes, you’re a hero, I mean it. Why, there are whole crowds of nice girls, like my sexy Miss Papp, you know, who are really breathing hard to lay someone who’s been wronged. They’ve been going around for years looking for a sufferer like you, a man misused by society. All you have to do now is to take it while it’s going. What a feeling, hey, Jay? What a feeling!’

  Even the pleasures of being a victim seemed to be lost on Walker, however; his face made no move, no spark came to his eye.

  ‘That’s a very exclusive circle those kids were breaking by letting you in,’ said Froelich. ‘You ought to feel honoured.’

  ‘I do,’ said Walker, ‘but also rather exhausted and confused.’

  ‘Well, look, why don’t we go by International House and pick up your things and take you back home? You could rest up this afternoon.’

  ‘Well, thank you,’ said Walker. ‘That’s probably a very good idea.’ He got up and they went out to the car.

  As they drove, Walker sat in silence, and Froelich thought back to the day when he had picked him up at the railroad depot and had brought him into town for the first time. Then, too, Walker had been surly, as if afraid of what he might expect; it was a characteristic thing with him, evidently. The future disturbed him. He was never a man for impassioned fire, it was clear; and he didn’t know how to hold or hunt a cause when there was one going. In a sense, Froelich was disappointed; he hoped he could count on Walker more to work his way through the next few busy weeks. On the other hand, though, the ball was now in his hands, and he was a man, he knew, capable of carrying it. He knew all the next moves; and perhaps it was even better if Walker was, as he seemed to be, anaesthetized. All was going brightly.

  He said, conversationally, as they drove past the hordes of students making their way to the cafeterias, ‘You know what’s going to happen next? Someone big is going to ask for you to be fired.’

  ‘Oh lord, no,’ said Walker.

  ‘Yes, that’s fine. That’s the trap. Then we really go into action. They really get themselves in trouble.’

  ‘How?’ asked Walker. ‘I should have thought I’d be the one in trouble.’

  ‘They get in trouble because we get all the liberal opinion in the country moving. The atmosphere’s on our side. McCarthyism is a dirty word. Fire a Britisher for saying what the writer has been saying aloud for two hundred years all over the west and you really go too far. You’ll be safe, Jay, that’s for sure. You’ll just be a big cause for a while. Joan of Arc.’

  Walker glumly packed his luggage as Froelich watched. Once the phone on the wall rang. Froelich picked it up and listened. ‘Could you say those words again, madam?’ he said finally, ‘I’m doing a survey of vernacular obscenity and there’s some material there I don’t think I have on file.’ He listened a moment. ‘She hung up,’ he said. ‘I’m going to put this phone off the hook. No use waking all the foreign students in the building. I see what you mean, though, Jay; that was real fierce.’

  ‘What do they do it for?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Oh, people live naked in this country. If you get steamed up you let everyone know. She seems to think that you’ve got at her family, and her womanhood, and her Americanness; they’re all bound up. It’s fear of the future.’

  ‘I think I suffer from that myself.’

  ‘Okay, well, stay off the phone, then. This all?’ They took the bags down and drove through Party to Froelich’s house. ‘Watch the sprinklers, Jay,’ said Froelich, as they got out of the car. Indoors, Patrice stood in the living room. ‘Hello, James,’ she said, looking pleased, and coming forward and kissing him. ‘I’m sorry I missed last night. I hear all over you were great.’

  ‘He wasn’t great,’ said Froelich. ‘He doesn’t even know what he said.’

  ‘Well, that isn’t what I heard.’

  ‘You heard what you wanted to hear because you find him attractive. But please don’t confuse sex with standards, baby.’

  ‘I always have,’ said Patrice, ‘except when I married you.’

  ‘Well, you always have been confused about that,’ said Froelich, putting down Walker’s luggage, ‘but now’s the time to mature this beautiful friendship. Jamie’s staying with us a few days.’

  ‘Oh, that’s great,’ said Patrice. ‘Why?’

  ‘He’s been getting these obscene phone calls at International House. The town’s really out against him. And we don’t want him to be scared off and start saying the wrong thing.’

  ‘The wrong thing for you might be the right thing for him.’

  ‘Well, we don’t have to worry too much about him just for a while, because now we’re concerned with something bigger, which is called politics.’

  ‘Oh, Jesus, Bernie,’ said Patrice, ‘be careful you don’t take this thing too far.’

  ‘You think I don’t know how to handle it? Look, let’s have a drink. You two sit over there and I’ll fix something. I like to hear you necking while I’m in the kitchen.’
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br />   Walker’s face seemed to clear a little at the prospect, and Froelich’s glow of joy began to return. ‘Watch him, he’s a bum,’ he heard Patrice say to Walker as he reached in the icebox for the cubes. ‘You’re both being very kind,’ Walker replied. He slid the serving-hatch open slightly, and saw that Walker and Patrice were kissing. Mutual self-congratulation! The victim and the saver of victims! The sad man who by his sadness wins all the votes for bearing the burden of the world! How we need him, and what he does for us! Froelich spied through the crack and felt an intense kind of pleasure. Here was a duet in which two spirits, one English, one American, sang in tune at last. They were Walker’s, and Froelich’s. They were united souls, of an ambience, sharing a single cause and having a taste for one woman. The comradely glow spread outwards into a sense of hope for the future. Never had Froelich felt so close to literature, to his book and the world of letters to which it contributed. And all we do now is wait, he thought, wait for the world to take up Walker and define him, wait for the sides to pick themselves, wait for causes and affections to work their way onward, wait for Walker’s role of positive genius to become historical. Who would have thought, on that day of the creative writing fellowship meeting, that those calculated words about a man Froelich didn’t even know would bring him here, sit him on this divan to kiss his wife, while around him history was being made and all America was defining attitudes towards him? Watching the kisses go on through the hatch, he felt an achieved man. Singing quietly, in his fieldhand’s voice, ‘There a man goin’ roun’ takin’ names,’ he poured a little martini, a lot of gin, into the shaker and mixed the contents slowly and deliberately, seeing no need whatever to hurry.

  On the morning after his lecture Walker, waking in his room in International House, had felt as if the world had come clear to him; a gay, good glow spread through his body and told him he had done well. He recognized the feeling; it was a return to the ethical jubilation of his earlier days as student and liberal bohemian, when causes were just and righteousness was assured. The intervening years seemed to have slipped away – those years of moral flabbiness, when marriage and a sense of the sheer complexities of living had brought him into ethical confusion, had brought him to suspect that others might be right as well as he. His beliefs had slowed; the discovery that truth seemed to reside more widely than, as a young man, he had cared to think, the realization that his self-righteousness was no more than a mode of piety, and that anyone could be pious, had quietened him down over a long and fallow spell. Why then, now, had truth taken him by the scruff of the neck, shaken him hard, made him do the great good thing? He didn’t know, but the glow of honest innocence was a prized possession, the more prized because it was a renewal of something he had known before. He got out of bed in joy. Outside his window a strange foreign bird sang. It was a bright day in late fall, with a slanting sun; the land looked freshened up and sparky after the rain of the night before; and his spirit went gaily along with it all, in tune. He felt healthy; his pallid skin seemed to him to have browned, his unco-ordinated body to have tightened, the loose muscles in his stomach to have grown hard. The sense of personal renewal was just what he had come here for, and all these intimations were goodness.

  He ought to have known that it couldn’t last, that it never lasted. A moment later the phone rang, and he was in a world of recriminations. Ethical joy was never pure; he had not pleased everyone by pleasing himself. The moral fog came down again; the rocket went up; Froelich hove alongside. Into Froelich’s car his luggage went, and, sulky and shocked again, with the world whirling by out of control, he let himself be led forward. From that point onward, the confusion worsened. The strange marriage of causes that linked him with Bernard Froelich was just like the marriage with Elaine; here, too, were ties that he didn’t remember knitting, but were evidently felt from the other end; here, too, was the sense he was committed to something of which he wasn’t the single master. And the end in view was much less clear, the implications of the relationship much more perplexing. He slept uneasily on the Froelich divan, wondering why he had been chosen. And if Froelich beckoned onward, intellectually and morally, then Patrice beckoned in other ways. Walker, wanting to understand and to be understood, knew of only one real place to go for that; it was a female place, and he felt that that, too, was waiting, was almost part of the bargain. Why? Froelich’s bland tolerance, and his very insistence that Walker and Patrice be affectionate, Walker thought he understood. After all, he had been a bohemian himself; he still was confused in that general area, and Froelich, he knew, was a man beyond outmoded ethicalities, a bohemian and a playboy himself. Everyone knew, including presumably Patrice, that he dated his students and took them for meals at Lucky’s Place; after that his car could be seen phutt-phutting painfully out of town, bearing its burden of two, leaving behind a student moral debate about whether it was right to hope, by advances in the world of affection, to gain elevation in the world of grades also.

  And so Walker, who was only a provincial bohemian, and knew it, found himself amiable but floundering in the world of the cosmopolitan variant. In an odd way, he yearned for the old simplicities, yearned to be back in marriage with Elaine. Those feelings, simple bourgeois matrimonial affections, returned to his mind and senses and were newly focused. He felt that it was this fear of going too far that had taken him away from Julie Snowflake, back to Miss Marrow, on the boat coming over. But here there was no Miss Marrow; and the bland little notes she sent him from time to time no longer impressed in quite the same way. She had regressed into Englishness; America, said her letters, was quaint and odd and funny. But he had gone on; had taken it to himself. Sitting at the Froelich breakfast table in the morning, while the Froelichs needled each other across the popup toaster and the eggs Hawaiian, Walker realized that Patrice mediated the relationship between him and Froelich. That was tacit all round. And Walker knew too that he was fascinated with Froelich. Froelich’s assurance, his pure sense of direction, his sheer energetic manipulation of his acquaintance, impressed Walker as he had not expected to be impressed in the States. It was a sheerly intellectual admiration, an admiration of finesse of mind and of a positive intellectual will. At first Froelich had been to him simply a bore; his moral importunities had been too pressing, too intense, too violent . . . the obsession of a biographer for his victim. Now he saw that Froelich’s role was more creative; he was a reforming spirit; intellectually dissatisfied with his subject, he was taking him onward to something better. Perhaps it was that he had already written his chapter and now had to make Walker live up to it; better to change the man than to retype fifty pages. Even if that was so, well, Walker had come all this way to be open to change. Change was his one commitment, his one demand of the world. He believed in search; he always had; if someone could lead and guide, then let him.

  So the days went by and Walker waited for things to fall into shape again. And one thing you could say . . . the world now seemed interested in him. Froelich, bringing Walker’s mail home from the department, came with challenge and praise and blame from all quarters. One letter Walker particularly cherished; it said: ‘I read about what you did in the NY Times and I think it was just really great. Forget those things I said, yes? You’re a knight of infinity; you made it. Here’s a kiss I had around someplace. Julie.’ On the third day of his stay at the Froelichs’, the Party Bugle appeared, bearing a hostile account of Walker’s lecture (Walker Offends Laws of Hospitality) and a versified advertisement which read:

  We gave foreign aid

  See how it’s repaid

  So why do we listen?

  Walker . . . go back to Britain.

  But loyal Americans will want the aid of Party’s Friendly Mortuary, for a friendly all-in interment at a difficult time.

  ‘You’re being talked about everywhere,’ said Bob Naughty, coming round with Eudora that night. He sat on the divan and took his shoes off.

  ‘Don’t flatter him,’ said Froelich. ‘We have to kee
p him under sedation, or he gets egotistical. He thinks all this brouhaha is about him.’

  ‘We really came round to talk to you about Eudora,’ said Bob Naughty. ‘She’s been unfaithful to me and I want your advice, Bernie.’

  ‘The point is,’ said Eudora, ‘he thinks it’s a violation of our marriage because it was someone he didn’t like.’

  ‘A used-car salesman, for Christ’s sake,’ said Bob Naughty. ‘He probably rides with the Klan. Hell, I wouldn’t want my daughter to marry one.’

  ‘He’s a really nice kid,’ said Eudora. ‘He’s all snarled up about the ethics of his profession. I think I can bring him through into sanity.’

  ‘It’s wrong to give people like that even sexual support,’ said Bob.

  ‘Bob, you’re projecting,’ said Eudora. ‘You’re just jealous and you’re trying to objectify it by getting at his profession. In any case, you know what your attitude is? It’s goddam prejudice in reverse. You’re discriminating against conservatives.’

  ‘Come on into the kitchen and we’ll talk about it,’ said Froelich.

  When they had gone, Walker said to Patrice, ‘It sounds an interesting ethical point.’

  Patrice said, ‘Well, the problem is Eudora’s a whore and they’ve tried to rationalize it. They’ll talk about it all night. Look, let’s take the car and go to Lookout Mountain. There’s a German bar up there and we can get beer. I don’t think I want to go all through this one again.’

  ‘Right, fine,’ said Walker.

  They drove in the falling darkness across the plain, the mountains pushed up in front of them. Then the night came down and all that was left of the mountains was a sprinkle of lights and the swaying beams of car headlamps. The old car began to climb the sharp-angled bends among the pines. There was a forest smell.

  ‘Tell me about Bernard,’ said Walker. ‘Why is he so interested in me?’