The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories

by The Penguin Book of Modern British Short Stories (retail) (epub)

  Life.

  Someone has to keep the records. I may even be thanked, in time.

  * * *

  MALCOLM BRADBURY

  * * *

  COMPOSITION

  I

  We are, for the purposes of this story, in the courthouse square of a very small Middle Western town. It is a hot, sunny afternoon in the September of an old, tumultuous year, 1971. In the centre of the square stands the courthouse itself, a Victorian building of no distinction, with defensive cannon at every corner. In front of the courthouse stands a statue, of a soldier, his rifle in a negative position, a Henry Fleming who has been perpetuated as he ducks out of the Civil War. On the copper roof of the building, gone green, a row of pigeons stands, depositing, in some vague evolutionary gesture, quantities of new guano on top of the old guano. From a corner of the square there enters the one Greyhound bus of the day, which comes down from the state capital, two hundred miles to the north, where they keep all the money and the records of accurate time. The bus has aluminium sides, green glareproof windows, and a lavatory; it circles the square, slows, and stops at the depot, a telephone booth outside Lee’s Diner. The driver, J. L. Gruner, safe, reliable, courteous, levers open the door; steps unfold; down the steps there descends, into the literal level of reality, in a brown suit, carrying a mackintosh on one arm, his hair long, his face lightly bearded, hot, but in good order, a person, a young English person named William Honeywell. His feet touch the board sidewalk, crisp with pigeon dung. He does not look around, or move far. Instead he stands close to the aluminium flank of the bus, which coughs diesel fumes at him, for the engine is still running, as J. L. Gruner gets down and unlocks the flaps under which this William’s luggage is concealed. J. L. Gruner has been William’s guide and conductor for most of the day, virtually ever since that early morning hour when William arrived, on the Boeing 727, after a transatlantic and then a transcontinental flight, in what pleases to call itself America. It is J. L. Gruner who took William’s ticket as he stood in the bleak bus station, amid the lockers and the bums, in the state capital, two hundred miles to the north; it is J. L. Gruner who, his face reassuringly reflected in the driving mirror, has driven him for four hours over rough concrete highways that flipped rhythmically under the tyres, unravelled straight ahead into the haze, flashing him past fields containing withered corn-stalks and rooting hogs, past sorghum mills and Burmah shave signs, past the Wishy Washy and the Dreme-Ez Motel, to deposit him on this wooden sidewalk, here. ‘Okay, pal, which is it?’ asks J. L. Gruner. William points out his big Antler suitcase, his little boxed typewriter, with their new airline labels; Gruner puts them out onto the sidewalk. ‘Thank you,’ says William. ‘Or righty,’ says Gruner, then he climbs back into the bus and, from the operator’s seat, clangs shut the big aluminium, or rather aluminum, for we are there not here, door. The diesel engine whirs; the bus moves, circles the square again, finds an exit, and takes off into the great American steppeland.

  William stands, beside his luggage, on the pigeon dung, in the dust, in his brown suit, holding his mackintosh. He is there, here. This is his beginning. He sniffs the smell, tastes the air, of the town. It has a faded, dusty note, as if generations of farmhands have shaken out their coveralls in the little square. Around it are two-storey buildings in wood and brick. There is a J. C. Penney, a Woolworth, a Floresheim Shoe, a McDonald Hamburger, a gas station with a sign saying ‘We really are very friendly’ and no people, and seven parking meters. A big dog lopes down the gutter. A cat comes out of J. C. Penney. A person laughs somewhere in Lee’s Diner. Somewhere out there Nixon is President. The marquee of the tiny movie house advertises I Was a Teenage Embalmer. The Pentagon Papers have appeared in the New York Times. A sign on the novelty store says ‘Worms’. They are having a war in Vietnam. They are having a sale on hoes at J. C. Penney. William goes on standing; he is here, such as it is. Somewhere in this town, if it is the right town and not the wrong town, there is a state university; the university has many students and a library containing the papers of many famous writers, none of whom have ever lived here. At that university, if it is here, and not there, William will teach Freshman Composition, a course in existential awareness and the accurate use of the comma. But is it here? On the steps of the courthouse, in the sunlight, a row of elderly farmers in faded denim coveralls sits; they have been there all the time, watching William unblinkingly. William, one eye on his luggage left on the sidewalk, moves, crosses over to them. They inspect him as he comes: the suit, the mackintosh, the longish red hair. William stops before them; he says, to the oldest and so presumably the wisest, ‘Excuse me, please.’ ‘What’s that, boy?’ asks the man, spitting into the dust. ‘Do you know,’ asks William, looking around, a mystification on his face, ‘where I can find the university?’ The man screws his eyes, thinks for a moment, spits again, and says: ‘Didn’t know it was lost, son.’ His eyes glaze, cackles come from the others, and the courthouse pigeons drop dung around the outer edges of the encounter, plainspeaking America triumphing over fancy Europe.

  William, standing there, knows himself. He is not a naïf. He has read widely in literature and profited emotionally from the experience. He has taken all the lesser drugs, has had two mistresses, and assisted one of them through a neurotic abortion. He has travelled as far as Turkey, has a good graduate student knowledge of structuralism; he has been hit by a policeman with a truncheon at a political demonstration in London, been in a sit-in, and written two pop songs. He has not been to America before, but has been Americanized, by cultural artefacts and universal modernization, and he knows it by image and by instinct. He has read America in many books. He has a part-written thesis in his luggage, on the disjunctive city in contemporary American fiction, and he has libertarian intentions. He has even come here hoping to find a little bit more of himself, to extend his being beyond its present circumscriptions and circumference. He has existential expectations, based on self-knowledge and sex. But he knows he is resident in a very old story: only I myself am novel, he thinks, the experience is not. Nixon is President. There are the Pentagon Papers. The Vietnam war, against which he has protested, goes on. There are black ghettos, poverty programmes, corruptions and conspiracies; actuality is continually outdoing our talents. History is moving apace, and is everywhere; the simple literary redemptions are hard to sustain. He wants more, deserves more, than a replay of old fictions, a plain and simple reality. ‘Great, thanks,’ he says, and walks back across the street to his lonely baggage on the sidewalk. But what, he thinks, next?

  ‘Hey,’ shouts one of the other farmers, pointing down the street. About half a block down, in front of Sears Roebuck, there is a cab, with a sign on the side saying ‘Schuler Taxi’; it was not there before. The driver sits inside and watches William unmovingly; he watches as he carries his heavy bag and his little case, the mackintosh over the shoulder, down the sidewalk. He watches, through the mirror, as William opens the rear door and lifts the luggage inside. ‘Baggage goes in the trunk,’ he says, when William is finished. ‘In the boot?’ asks William. ‘In the trunk,’ says the man. It is an ancient terminological game they are playing, thinks William, as he heaves out the bag and puts it in the binominal place, the rehearsal, a million times in, of a traditional, weary encounter; the lousy part is it also strains the back. ‘Whar to?’ asks the man, when William is back in the cab. William hands him the slip of paper that has been sent to him, back in England, stating his dormitory reservation, exhausted with dialogue. The man starts the cab, tours the square, strikes out into the hinterland. They pass the Astoria Motel, which advertises two for the price of one, and through a residential section where housewives sit on frame porches in mail-order sportswear. ‘Whar ya frum, boy?’ asks the man. Now there are stone houses with Greek letters over the doors, and young men lying outside them in Ford Mustangs, with their feet over the side. ‘England,’ says William. There are Victorian semi-churches, covered in red ivy, a large football stadium, a televisio
n mast. ‘England, huh? Hoity toity,’ says the man. There is a long low building outside which students in sweatshirts are throwing a frisbee in great arcs. ‘Five dollars,’ says the man, ‘You’ll like it here better.’ ‘Will I?’ says William, finding currency. ‘Good.’ ‘One time we had a mayor of Chicago punched your King George right in the snoot,’ says the cabbie. ‘You did?’ asks William. ‘That’s history, that’s an accurate fact,’ says the man, staring incredulously at the quarter William has pressed into his palm as a tip, ‘You can look it up in all them books you guys has gotten in that library.’ ‘I will,’ says William, collecting up his luggage. A frisbee whizzes past his ear. ‘Some of those fraternity boys,’ say the cabbie, admiringly, ‘they lay eight, ten girls a week. They get prizes for it.’ ‘Well earned, no doubt,’ says William. ‘Don’t forget now,’ says the cabbie, ‘It’s better here, so if you don’t like it go back where you came from.’

  ‘Ting,’ says a voice, as William, carrying his bags, pushes open the door of the graduate dormitory and walks into the hall, ‘Ting.’ ‘I’ve just arrived from England, fresh to teach Freshman Composition, and I have a room booked here,’ says William to a small oriental student in a collegiate sweater, who sits in a small wooden armchair in a cubicle, reading Lemon and Reis, eds., Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. ‘Ting,’ says the student, getting up and shaking his hand. There is a metal bunk bed, an armchair, a small desk, and a lamp on a snaky spiral support, which looks capable of wrapping itself around the arm as you write under its light (a minor symbol, a serpent for the American Eden), in the first-floor room this student leads him to. ‘Fine, thanks,’ says William. ‘Ting,’ says the student. William begins to unpack: his clothes, his medicines, his teaching notes, his small flute, his part-thesis, the leather toilet-case given him, with tears at Heathrow, by the girl with the abortion. He sits on the bed. There is a knock at the door. ‘Ting,’ says the oriental student, ‘I take you to where we eat.’ But it is evening now: the sun has suddenly withdrawn, leaving a faint chill, and William has been awake for a ridiculous number of hours. He has culture-shock, jet-lag, a coffee hangover, the plasticized remnant of an airline meal knotted in his stomach. He says he will sleep. He finds a bathroom, with no doors on the stalls, and an Arab sitting on one of the bowls. He urinates, returns to his room, undresses, gets into the iron bed. There are a few brief, disorienting images in his head – of a girl in a caftan who sat across the aisle in the jet, of a man in the bus depot in the state capital who asked for a quarter and then, hearing his accent, raised it to fifty cents – such as travellers have to make them feel lonely; but they are purged by unconsciousness, and he is asleep, his red hair on an American pillow.

  It is much later, in the middle of the American night, when he wakens to a curious noise. He gets up and, in Winceyette pyjamas, goes to the window. The landscape suddenly judders and explodes; the rural plain which stretches beyond the window is lit by a bright green glare. In it, white barns flash into existence, then expire. A torrential rain is falling. Blackness resumes. ‘Cling, cling,’ goes a noise. There is a strange hooting and a roaring. The noise, mobile, comes closer. On the right of the blank composition a slowly gyrating, long beam of light appears, its shifting angle casting itself first towards William, then away again. Another green flash lights up the fast-running sky; William realizes that this is abstract realism he is in, and he sees that the shrieking torch is his first American train. It grinds near; it says ‘Cling, cling’; it passes hard by the dormitory. As it does so, a bolt snaps down and catches a power sub-station, mounted fecklessly on a pole across the street. It explodes with a flash and a roar. There is a scream, as of pleasure. In the flash, William has seen a human figure. On the grass below his window it stands, a fat naked girl, her legs wide apart, pushing up her loose large breasts to take onto them the impact of the rain. There is a knock at the door. ‘Ting,’ says a voice. ‘Cling cling,’ says the train. ‘Who?’ says William. ‘You,’ says a voice. ‘What is it?’ asks William. ‘A visit,’ says the voice. William goes and opens the door. The little oriental who met him stands there, in shortie pyjamas. ‘Bill Ting, your counsellor,’ he says. ‘You must close lindow. Water coming through floor into my loom downstair.’ ‘I’m sorry,’ says William. ‘Also, offplint of article for loo to lead. For English opinion. Source, Victorian Studies.’ Another pleasured scream shrills from outside. ‘Who wrote it?’ asks William. ‘Ting,’ says Ting, ‘On Charlotte Blontë.’ ‘Look, I’ll read it tomorrow,’ says William, putting the offplint on his desk, ‘Goodnight.’ He goes back to the window, to shut it. It is entire black outside, too black to see the girl: the storm is subsiding. ‘Okay, America,’ says William to the dark world beyond the fly-screen, ‘we’ll let you know.’

  William stands in a puddle and closes the window; but the truth is that, despite himself, he is at last impressed. He knows himself under the agency of divine comedians of a somewhat different stamp from those whose work he has always known, new gods with a fancier taste in apocalyptics, quite like those of the modern critics he reads. He is here. What will he do? He will teach freshmen composition, demonstrate the orderly economy of language, the complexities of langue and parole, cleanse the tools of speech and thought. He will teach wisdom, taste, cultural awareness. ‘Ring,’ goes the telephone. ‘Ting,’ says a voice down the wire. ‘Lain still come in.’ ‘Leave me alone,’ says William. He stands in the dark, thinking of the girl with the abortion, dark-haired, a little fat, someone he is not sure whether to remember or forget. It is an imperfect image: a photograph into which the light has been let. He stands in the puddle, he feels in a muddle. Somewhere below the typewriter clatters. He gets into bed, he puts down his head. The typewriter reaches the end of a line: ‘Ping,’ it says. He starts to weep, he goes to sleep.

  II

  ‘You seem to be a well set-up, morally earnest young man,’ says Fardiman, ‘The sort of person who takes literature seriously, and teaches it good. So why worry?’ Outside the window, on the grass, blue jays screech offensively. A man with a leaf-collecting machine comes by under the trees, collecting a faint harvest from the first of the fall. Two dogs copulate over by the Business Building. It is a bright fall day; William can see all this from the screened wooden window of the office in Humanities Hall he shares with five other graduate assistants. He has a large desk by the window, a desk with inkstains in the drawers and a large, high-backed, swivel chair. William is grieving. He has been teaching now for just over a week, and has met all his classes, twice, in the Chemistry Building, his hands dangling loosely in the pedagogic sink, or absent-mindedly turning on the gas-taps, as he stares outward at the massive ethnic mix of the faces before him. Overcoming timidity, if not terror, he has begun work; he has told them where his office is, writing a map on the board so they can all find him, and where the library is, and where they are; he has asked them to write for him the first theme on the official schedule, on the demanding topic of ‘My Home Town’. Now these themes have come in, deposited in a pocket outside his office door; he is marking them now. Fardiman sits at the next desk, writing a report for the graduate seminar on Milton he is taking; he keeps a copy of the Kama Sutra on his desk and a jar of apple cake on the bookcase. William is chewing apple cake as he reads. ‘I am,’ says William, turning to Fardiman, ‘I’m a devotee of Leavis, though I disapprove of his culturally right-wing position, and also his interpretation of Women In Love. I’m also into semiotics, and I’m somewhat influenced by Frank Kermode.’ ‘I was reading his What’s the Sense of an Ending?’ says Fardiman, ‘It stirred me in the gut. It gives me faith in my own clerkly scepticism. Now that’s what you could use some of, right now.’ ‘I’ve read and digested Roland Barthes and the Tel Quel school,’ says William, ‘I’m into Adorno and Horkheimer and revisionist Marxist esthetics. I’m interested in alternative education. I’ve got a part to play. But, Fardiman, what’s it all got to do with essays about “My Home Town”?’ ‘It’s all phenomenological
discourse,’ says Fardiman, ‘Writing degree about twenty below. It has a beginning, a middle and an end, not usually in that order, but this it shares with most modern literature. It adds up to the cumulative fund of words in the universe; and, William, we want those words right.’ William groans; he pushes the theme he has been reading across onto Fardiman’s desk, which, in the cramped space, is up against his own. The theme begins: ‘The people which lives in my home town is good folks, bad folks, rich folks, poor folks, white and some black, go to church and not go to church, and many other things.’

  Fardiman puts down his apple cake and, picking up a red pen, he looks at the theme. While he reads, William swivels his chair and stares again through the screened window. Blue jays screech. The leaf-collector with the leaf-collector collects the leaves. The dogs are separate and distinct. Along the pathway between Humanities and Business, so ironically juxtapered, as if by some cynically literary architect, a procession begins. The bells have rung in the classrooms and the students pour along the paths, in bright clothes, the girls making cradles of their arms to carry their textbooks and notecases in. Some of the students, a distinctive group, the girls without bras, the men with long hair and Afros, go by with anti-war placards; there is a political demonstration that day. William has a sense of his pointless little face staring through the dark grilled screens at what they are doing. But he is here to read what they have written, which seems to bear no resemblance to what they are doing, to have no connection with these minds and bodies. ‘It’s not a great start,’ says Fardiman, putting down the theme, ‘But how would you have started it?’ ‘It’s not my home town,’ says William, ‘There are all kinds of ways to start a piece about a town, if you want to start one.’ ‘Talk to him,’ says Fardiman, ‘Try to get him to do it more personally. But there’s real potential here.’ ‘There is?’ asks William, staring at Fardiman. ‘Sure there is. This kid is a comma artist. I know it doesn’t sound much, with the world the way it is, and Tel Quel the way it is, but those are real good commas.’ William looks at Fardiman, who has marched on the Pentagon, and reads Illich, and will refuse to be drafted; and he sees no light. ‘Don’t be anxious,’ says Fardiman, ‘It’s your task to take these self-satisfied, super-sensual oafs and lead them, through the study of sentences, into becoming mature, questioning, critical, politically alert individuals like ourselves.’ ‘With better hang-ups,’ says William. ‘Right,’ says Fardiman. ‘Alternatively, I guess, you could move, yourself, in the other direction, and have fun.’