Stepping Westward
Page 41
Once through the tunnel on to Manhattan, they found traffic packed on streets dirty with snow. Garbage cans overflowed in gutters. On one of the avenues they came upon a vast road-building operation; the street was dug out to half its width for repair, and surrounded by barriers – DIG WE MUST – FOR A GROWING NEW YORK. The bus moved forward in short spurts, and it was over an hour before they reached midtown. ‘We’re really snarled up here today,’ said the driver. ‘The Penn Railroad is on strike and that’s why all the traffic is out this way.’ Then they reached the terminal. Walker pushed down the car to be out of it early; then he had to wait until the redcaps unlocked the luggage compartment and unloaded his goods. Suitcases, typewriter, bongo drums. Walker hung them about him and fled through the terminal crowds. He reached the door and saw the clock above it. He was due on his ship five minutes ago.
What was left, then, was despair and sorrow and defeat. He was a stranded man; there was no rescue. He walked outside and stood in the cold street, his luggage strung about him, while along the sidewalk by the bus depot the bums of New York watched him amiably, the world’s ignoble, the little version of man, ready to claim him. Before the bus had stopped, he had counted his money; forty-five dollars was his worldly wealth, and of wealth spiritual there was none.
A yellow cab drew up by the kerbside and the driver pushed open the door. ‘Where ya goin’, mac?’ he shouted. Whimsical hope butted Walker; he got in with his luggage, and gave the number of the pier. ‘Take me one hour minimum in this snarl-up,’ said the driver.
‘Is there no way of getting there fast? My ship is sailing just about now.’ Walker, saying this, imagined the vessel, easing out past the Battery and the Statue of Liberty into the peace of the ocean, the Welcome Aboard banners flapping in the bar where the Get-Together Dance would be held.
‘Yeah,’ said the driver, ‘buy a helicopter. Odderwise you take one hour minimum.’
‘One hour,’ said Walker.
‘You wanna go or doncha?’ asked the driver.
‘Yes, I’ll go,’ said Walker, ‘I’ll give myself over to fate.’
‘Yeah, why not?’ said the driver.
‘You should see my fate,’ said Walker.
‘Take a look at any guy’s,’ said the driver. ‘Take me, I oughta have gone to college. Business school. Now I drive a beat-up cab.’ Walker sweated in the cold back seat, the unfortunate traveller.
‘One automobile too many and this island stops, you know that?’ said the cabbie, inching forward in the blockage. ‘We live on the edge of chaos here.’
They moved slowly onward through tenemented streets, past the abattoir. They stopped again, waiting to cross the Riverside Expressway. Hunting along the piers, where the ships stood, Walker saw his own vessel, still at the dock.
They reached the water’s edge and Walker leapt out. He grabbed suitcases, typewriter, bongo drums. ‘I want to be on that ship,’ he said to a longshoreman, paying the cab driver.
‘Not a chance,’ said the longshoreman, hostilely, ‘they already took up the gangplank.’ Walker took up all his luggage and rushed in through the entrance. ‘Okay, mac,’ said the longshoreman, suddenly redeemed, no longer what he was and had been since Walker’s last time here, ‘we take a chance.’ He seized the two suitcases and ran with them up the staircase. Walker flapped behind, in his harlequin jacket, typewriter in one hand, drums in the other.
The immigration men were talking round a desk, but one looked up at Walker and took his papers. ‘You quitting already?’ he said. ‘Your visa gives you another six months.’
‘I’ve got to go home,’ said Walker.
A siren sounded on the ship. He ran along the pier, fat, flabby, trapped in being Walker, while the wooden timbers rebounded beneath his feet. The sweat ran down the blubbery flesh in which he was imprisoned, in spite of the winter cold and the breeze blowing hard off the Hudson. He prayed to Chance: For once, just once, be kind. And then he felt an old familiar sensation growing in his nose. It was a snuffle; he was starting with a cold. For the first time in his life he had gone through half a winter without a chill; the American climate had evidently suited him. He was brown, his health was better, his dandruff seemed to have gone. But one only had to think about England and one was swabbing away at a cold. No time to stop; he dipped in his pocket as he ran and brought out a rather dirty handkerchief. ‘Achoo, achoo, achoo,’ he cried into the high, echoing, empty building. And suddenly confidence overwhelmed him and he knew that he was going home.
There was no gangplank, now, but at the far end of the dock a small rope-and-metal ladder led up to the ship’s high side. The longshoreman reached it first. ‘Guy here wants to come aboard. Passenger got caught in the traffic snarl-up,’ he shouted. Walker reached in his pocket and felt the final forty dollars. Two stewards emerged at the head of the ladder and came down toward him. Walker took the notes and gave them out; twenty for the longshoreman, ten each for the stewards. The stewards took the cases and the typewriter. Walker held on to the drums, all that he was going back with. He looked up at the steep side he had to climb. Then, above him, he heard a cry. Over the rail, high in the air, a gauzy scarf waved. ‘Hello there, Mr Bigears,’ screamed a voice. Walker groaned, and sneezed, and applied himself to the ladder.
EPILOGUE
THE COMMITTEE MEETING convened to appoint next year’s Creative Writing Fellow took place in the Administration Building over a lunch-hour one day toward the end of March. When they arrived, one of President Coolidge’s many secretaries was setting up the tape-recorder: ‘Come right in,’ she said, ‘and talk good.’ They gathered round the shiny conference table; there were several members of the English Department; there was Dean French; there was Selena May Sugar from Physical Education. They spread out their lunches on the table and looked through the window at the snow outside. There was no sign of spring yet; Party and the campus of Benedict Arnold were still locked in ice. The campanile began to ring out one o’clock and on its last stroke President Coolidge came in. He sat down at the head of the table and called the meeting to order with his special Phi Beta Kappa key. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, this meeting’s to consider about next year’s writing fellowship in this U. I got several apologies for absence and other absences. Dr Wink’s away on sabbatical; I had a card from him from Perugia and he wants you all to know he’s having a great time and that the Italians are going crazy for business administration. I think that’s an honour for all of us. Harris, well, Harris isn’t too well right now and he felt he couldn’t make it. We usually have the present writer here, but this year, I guess some of you, most of you, know, the man we brought out here was suddenly called away in the middle of last semester and, to be frank, we haven’t heard a word out of him since. You might like to know he only took his salary up to the day he quit this campus. Now just a minimal point before we hand over to the Head of the English Department: I always say this, but remember if you don’t talk good and loud into that tape-recorder Alison down in the pool ain’t going to hear a single goddam word. Well, okay, right, I’ll hand over to the new English Department Chairman. Okay, Bern?’
‘Right, thank you, President,’ said Bernard Froelich. ‘I ought to start out by saying how sorry I am that Harris isn’t here. As you all know, Harris did a hell of a lot for the writing fellowship and in a way it’s hard not to associate it with him. He really worked it up to what it is now.’ Froelich spoke with ease and comfort; the role of chairman sat on him well, and had done, from the day he had been elected by the department after Harris Bourbon had resigned. ‘Of course,’ said Froelich, ‘it meant so much to him that, as I believe most of you know, it was the issue on which he resigned the chairmanship. I think we mustn’t forget that in our discussion of it.’
‘Well, yes, that’s right, Bern,’ said President Coolidge. ‘It was a very unfortunate matter, but Harris came out of it right well. He had his ethics and he stuck by his ethics and I’m always impressed by a man who knows his own principles. Now
we all know that Harris boobed a bit in not making enough enquiries at the start, and letting our writer last year get way out of line, but I think that just shows how open-hearted and liberal Harris has always been and still is, I guess.’
‘Well, clearly, we all read that situation differently,’ said Froelich. ‘But that’s all the more reason for being especially careful in our appointment this year. If we want to make an appointment, that is. Because I remember last year Harris – I wish he was here – Harris raised the question of whether the fellowship should continue, whether it contributed enough to the university. I expect we’ll all want to talk about that, especially when I tell you that we’ve already had difficulties in our approaches this year.’
‘I thought you were really rooting for it last year, Dr Froelich,’ said Selena May Sugar.
‘Well, I was, Selena,’ said Froelich, ‘but my view is that a fellowship like this can only exist where the writer in question isn’t under pressure. Now, as we all know, and all deplore, a writer at this university is still under pressure. That’s why Mr Walker’s not sitting in that chair right there . . .’
‘Oh, I don’t think you can say that, Bern,’ said President Coolidge. ‘I think everyone has to admit that if Mr Walker had wanted to stay on this campus he could have stayed. No, I don’t see any blame on this U for what happened to Mr Walker.’
‘Yes, well, it’s a contentious point, and I’ll drop it right now,’ said Froelich. ‘Now that I’ve put it on record. But I’d just like to make one proposal to this meeting. I don’t know whether this is possible under the terms of the funds, but I’d like to suggest that we accept the fact that the writing fellowships have been less than successful, and we put the money into a literary quarterly edited from this campus by the staff of the English Department.’
Having exploded his bombshell, Froelich sat back. He felt pleased with himself and a little impressed at his handling of this situation. ‘Aren’t you writing a book this year, Bernard?’ asked Selena May Sugar. Froelich, a man unused to blushing, did slightly blush. His book on Plight had now been refused by four publishers, a fact unknown to his department, and now that he had attained the status he had long ago intended to attain there seemed little need to sail in the difficult waters of publishing any longer. One published to become what he already was. Now with a magazine one could place the chapters as articles, one could promote causes. Magazines did not, like Walkers, run away; magazines did not sleep with one’s wife; magazines did not fear for the things they had said and the consequences of their statements. The discussion went on, in the dark March light, and Froelich added his word here and there. President Coolidge pointed out that the fund was specifically for a writer; Froelich pointed out that the donor of the fund was still alive, and could be approached. ‘In fact,’ he said, ‘I went to see him a couple of weeks ago, and he wouldn’t have any objection, if that clears things up at all.’
‘I don’t think you ought to have done that, Bern,’ said President Coolidge.
‘I know how busy you are, President,’ said Froelich. ‘I thought if the matter was to be discussed at the meeting we’d better find out the lay of the terrain.’
‘Well, there’s something in that, Bernie,’ said Coolidge. ‘All right, let’s put this one out on the prairie and see if the coyotes grab it.’
Froelich looked around the table and could see success ahead. He looked at an empty chair and had a wish come to him: it was the wish that James Walker were sitting in it to see all this achievement. He often thought of Walker. He knew he had left town, sneaking off into the night, because he believed that to provide this success was all he had been in Party for. He had gone believing himself a manipulated man, and believing too that he, Bernard Froelich, was puppeteer of the whole marionette show. That was what his cryptic letter of resignation, written from San Francisco, had in essence said: You have made me destroy a man. Even if, to a point, Walker’s picture of the situation was true, Froelich had never seen it primarily in that light. He had had a notion of an ideal collaboration – of writer and critic; of English liberal and American liberal; of two men of good spirit and goodwill. This world, it was true, favoured those who had ends in view, and to this extent Froelich had gone forward and Walker had, well, gone back. This was because Walker was subjective pessimism and he was objective history, a turning wheel. And in that matter, too, out of affection and regard, he had tried to be mentor, to show Walker that to live in the ethically flabby belief that the world is good and innocent and that all men can be assimilated and loved without hurt was wrong, that deeper connections had to be made. Walker, a believer in personal relationships and a conspicuously bad performer in what he believed in, had never succeeded; he could never have succeeded even without Froelich. Froelich had tried to show him the true face of love, with Patrice, with Julie; there are no disconnected idylls, he had tried to hint. No hurting, Walker had said. But Walker had not sailed without a hurt or two left behind on his own account. He thought of Patrice, and of that complex union of three linked spirits, of the group that went wider than love; there were hurts for Patrice and for Froelich too in that abandonment. But risk-takers expect that; and it was Walker, really, who had sailed away most intact, wrapped in the bundle of himself. And if the world had reformed behind him and left some high and others low, then that was the way of the world, the way it progressed and changed. There were no special injustices, just those of process and the human lot. That had been the lesson Froelich had prepared for his classroom sessions; but the pupil had gone, cut class, and Froelich was Chairman, and the President was now accepting his proposal, and all that Froelich could think was that he, since he was human, was missing Walker very, very much.
STEPPING WESTWARD
MALCOLM BRADBURY is a well-known novelist, critic and academic. He set up the famous creative writing department of the University of East Anglia, whose students have included Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro. He is the author of seven novels: Eating People is Wrong (1959); Stepping Westward (1965); The History Man (1975), which won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize; Rates of Exchange (1983), which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize; Cuts (1987); Doctor Criminale (1992); and To the Hermitage (2000). He has also written several works of non-fiction, humour and satire, including Who Do You Think You Are? (1976), All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go (1982) and Why Come to Slaka? (1991). He is an active journalist and a leading television writer, responsible for Porterhouse Blue (Channel Four), Cold Comfort Farm (BBC TV), many TV plays and episodes of Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Kavanagh QC and Dalziel and Pascoe. He lives in Norwich, travels a good deal, and was awarded a knighthood in the year 2000.
Also by Malcolm Bradbury in Picador
FICTION
Eating People is Wrong
The History Man
Rates of Exchange
Cuts
Doctor Criminale
To the Hermitage
NON-FICTION
Who Do You Think You Are?
All Dressed Up and Nowhere to Go
Why Come to Slaka?
First published 1965 by Secker & Warburg
This edition published 2000 by Picador
This electronic edition published 2012 by Picador
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Copyright © Malcolm Bradbury 1965, 1983
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