Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Right,’ said Walker.

  ‘Right right,’ said Dr Bourbon, pouring out juice into a beaker. ‘You got to be mighty sharp to git ahead of me. Read plays at all, Mis’ Walker?’

  ‘Some.’

  ‘Marston?’

  ‘No, I’m afraid not.’

  ‘That’s a mighty underestimated man, that Marston,’ said Bourbon, slapping fat around the eggs with a fish-slice. ‘You read him, boy, you take a look. Immoral, though. That egg look right to your taste?’

  ‘It looks fine to me.’

  Bourbon sprinkled some tabasco sauce over his concoction and put it in front of Walker, still in the skillet. ‘There now, git some of this good grub down you and meet the day right.’

  ‘Give him a glass of milk, Harris,’ said Mrs Bourbon, who had been operating the dishwasher in another corner of the big kitchen.

  ‘You want some toast with that?’ asked Bourbon, pouring the milk into a glass.

  ‘No, thanks,’ said Walker.

  ‘Yes, give him some French toast,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

  As Walker ate they stood around him, high and lanky the one, round and maternal the other, working out his plans for the day. Did he want a freewheelin’ day, just moseyin’ around, or a programmed day, with a picnic and a trip somewhere? Would he care for something on the hi-fi while he breakfasted (Dr Bourbon rushed into the community room to put on Copeland’s ‘Billy the Kid’, which boomed out western euphoria through the seven speakers scattered about the house)? Or would he care to listen to KNOW, the campus radio station (Mrs Bourbon flipped the switch, and Dr Lee Fichu came bubbling through with a sunshine course on astral physics, carefully directed to the taste of fact-oriented morons)? The campus carillon changed to ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’; the coffee bubbled in the percolator; the kids made a rumpus in the rumpus room. The warm air soughed on the patio. Too fresh, new and innocent to have any plans, Walker said so. ‘I’ll do what you think,’ he said. The Bourbons strove to commit him to decisions, pointing out, in effect, that America was a democratic country, and it was every man’s task to create his own fate even if he had no background on which to decide it. ‘It’s your choice, Mis’ Walker,’ said Bourbon, looking distressed. Bourbon suggested trips here, Mrs Bourbon suggested trips there. There was Party to see, and the campus, and the county, and the mountains, and the mines, and the ranches, and the state as a whole, and the next state, and the state after that. ‘I leave it entirely to you,’ said Walker.

  ‘So polite, the English,’ said Mrs Bourbon, adding as an afterthought, to restore community. ‘Aren’t we?’

  On the first day they had gone up to the mountains, and had a picnic in the pine forest. ‘We got a course in picnicking at the university,’ said Dr Bourbon. ‘It’s called Geology, but it’s really picnicking.’ Coming back, they stopped on the ridge of the foothill range and looked down upon Party, a green tract in the distance identifiable by the phallic campanile of the university. On the second day they drove the other way, into the shortgrass plains, until the mountains dipped out of sight and the endless flatness that Walker had seen on his arrival became the only landscape. Today, on the third day, Dr Bourbon, forced to make Walker’s decisions for him, revealed that he really had a meeting at the university and ought to go there. ‘Well, I’d love to look around the campus,’ said Walker.

  ‘Well, right, good,’ said Bourbon. ‘Actually I was goin’ to suggest it, if you’d wanted to do anything else . . .’

  They finished breakfast, the Bourbons went into their bedrooms and took off their Japanese robes, and then it was time to go and, Bourbon in Levi’s, Mrs Bourbon in Bermuda shorts, they got into the car and drove into town. On campus great cranes lifted new buildings into place. They drove down fraternity row, past the houses, some castellated and defensible, some modern and indefensible; they looked to be interesting mixtures of formal luxury and informal squalor. Rows of red MGs and white Corvettes were parked outside. ‘All those cars,’ said Walker.

  ‘You ain’t seen nothin’,’ said Bourbon. ‘Why, most of the brothers ain’t even back yet.’

  Further on were the sororities, where brown baked girls in two straps played basketball or sat outdoors reading in aluminium garden furniture. ‘Hang on to him here,’ said Dr Bourbon. ‘Don’t let him leap out the car.’ Then along the campus roads, of which there were several miles, past the lake (‘You might want to do a bit of swimmin’ there, but there are plenty of garden pools among the faculty. Trouble is you got to walk to them’), past the tower of KNOW (‘a truly stimulatin’ project; I reckon that’s made us into a real educated little town’), past the student theatre (‘has its good years and its bad years, guess this is one of its bad years, heh, sweetie?’), the gymnasium (‘we’re mighty proud of the Olympic pool; fact we could put on the Olympics right here’), and the football stadium, where grotesquely shaped monolithic men struggled with padded machines against the fence (‘team’s down a bit this year; they lost their coach, he was bribing high-school kids with cars to come to BAU.’ ‘What happened to him?’ ‘He was demoted to full professor’).

  ‘What’s that building?’ said Walker, spotting a small version of Caernarvon Castle, dwarfed by the football stadium.

  ‘I guess that’s the library people keep talkin’ about,’ said Bourbon.

  ‘He knows it is,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘Why, Harris spends a whole lot of time in the library.’

  Bourbon stopped the car with a screech. ‘Want to take a look? We got some good stuff here. First Folios, that kind of thing. But you ain’t a Shakespearean, are you?’

  ‘I’d like to see it,’ said Walker.

  ‘Harris teaches a one-semester course in library use for entering freshmen,’ said Mrs Bourbon, as they got out. ‘Isn’t that right?’

  ‘Tellin’ ’em how to find it, mostly,’ said Bourbon. An inscription over the portcullis, one letter obliterated by trailing ivy, declared: A GOOD OOK IS THE PRECIOUS LIFE BLOOD OF A MASTER SPIRIT. At the head of the steps, whereon several students sat smoking, was a large statue, representing innocence, female, naked and immense, taking a draught of learning from a stone jar. On its backside, which faced the visitor, the Greek letters of a fraternity had been inscribed in blue. They went through into the catalogue hall, freshened by air-conditioning, and then, past an elderly attendant female with blue hair, into the stacks. Suction equipment cleansed the air of dust and the only hazard was the perpetual twang of static electricity as they touched the shelves. Finding around him so much scholarship, Walker tasted for a moment the thought of writing one of these big books, solid and reliable, as a symbol of his election into a new community. But his mind, as he thought on, seemed not to be tuned to it. There was a time when novelists could decently write, in six weeks, a small tome on Novels I Love or Sport and the Novel, but those days had passed; now the new academic creator wrote Mimesis or The Road to Xanadu and took it quite comfortably along with his fiction. But he really hadn’t come that far; he didn’t know that much; and a sort of guilt about his lack of competence began to affect him as he stood in the bowels of this new world. ‘Lots of people wukkin’ in here today,’ said Dr Bourbon to him. ‘That’s because the library’s the coolest spot on campus. We made it that way by design. I’m always tellin’ my students, “Use the library; it’s the coolest spot on campus.” We infect a lot of very good kids that way.’ Bourbon’s bumbling scholarship, the foreignness of the students moving about in the stacks, even the fearsome American static electricity, conspired with Walker’s self-consciousness about his own academic qualifications to make him feel a stranger. How could he teach here? What would he do?

  Dr Bourbon continued the tour, pointing out to Walker the shelves devoted to the English literature classification and the special reserve section, into which Walker would put reserved copies of the course books he was going to use. Even this was something about which he had not thought. Did his academic innocence show? Was even the self-centred Bourbo
n beginning to worry about the man he had brought here? But why worry? Bourbon seemed to accept everything; he took Walker into the undergraduate reading room, where, even now, a few early students on study dates read books with their arms around one another, and was unfazed by that sensuous spectacle; he paid no attention, as he led them back out of the door, to the fact that someone had pasted, on the pudenda of the statue, a notice declaring ‘Made in the Virgin Islands by Virgins’. The world was all one to him. They came back to the car and got in. ‘Lots of folks,’ said Bourbon, letting out the clutch, ‘call Benedict Arnold a play school, figurin’ that our kids just come here for a good time. Course we do have a lot of good sports around here, but that’s only a part of the students’ life around here. I get annoyed when people say our kids don’t learn nothin’. They learn a lot. They teach us and we teach them. We expect ’em to learn a lil and live a lil and play a lil. That’s what a U is for.’

  ‘I suppose it is,’ said Walker, watching a boy student walking by with a girl student on his shoulders.

  ‘And over here, right there where those panties are hanging out the window, that’s Thrump Hall, the girls’ dorm. And this here in front of it is student parkin’. President Coolidge was one of the first Prexies in the States to realize that one thing students require of a U is good parkin’.’

  They drew up outside the English Department, in its wooden hut. ‘I guess I’ll take the car and go down to the supermarket,’ said Mrs Bourbon.

  ‘Okay, sweetie, you take a bite downtown somewhere and we’ll git ourselves a snack in the Faculty Club. That way I can introduce Mis’ Walker to a few of the guys. Then maybe you’ll stop by around the middle afternoon and pick us up.’

  The car drove off, and Bourbon watched it go, his face dropping as he noticed the damaged rear end. ‘Wonder if Froelich’s in the buildin’ today,’ he said. ‘Come on in and we’ll do a tour around.’ Bourbon pointed out all the salient features of the premises. He showed Walker where the Coke machine was, and where to find the janitor. He took him into the English Office and introduced him to the four secretaries, neat young girls who sat behind typewriters painting their nails and beaming goodwill when people came in. ‘I want you to shake hands with these girls. Kiss ’em if you like. You’re going to depend on them a lot. If they moved out the building would fall down.’

  ‘Hello,’ said the girls. After Walker had told them how he was liking it over here and the girls had told him how much fun it was to have him here, Bourbon took Walker’s arm and led him to a wall which had been neatly boxed out with a mass of pigeonholes.

  ‘Here’s where you find your mail,’ he said.

  ‘Are these all staff pigeonholes?’ asked Walker, for there seemed to be hundreds of them.

  ‘Oh, er,’ said Bourbon, pleased at his surprise, ‘course most of them is graduate assistants, part-timers. We do a lot with part-timers over here, boy, you know. Comp. and all that.’

  ‘What’s Comp.?’

  ‘Well, it’s a course in basic essentials of English we teach to all enterin’ freshmen. Readin’, Writin’, Speakin’ and Listenin’. How to underline. Use of the comma. Speakin’ from the diaphragm. It’s a service course to enable them to communicate with one another without sex, that’s how I always see it.’

  Walker found a pigeonhole with his name on it and was surprised to see that it was already filled with letters. ‘I put a telegram in there for you,’ said one of the secretaries, Miss Zukofsky. Walker found the telegram on top and put it in his pocket. Underneath it was a letter, cyclostyled, from President Coolidge, welcoming him to this U and looking forward to many years of happy association and contact. Then there was a cyclostyled invitation to take a season ticket to the auditorium series, which opened in early October with an evening of chamber music by the campus string quartet, the Gold Nugget String Four. There was a map to show him how to find his way about campus. There was a free desk copy of a large dictionary. There was an invitation from the Foreign Students Group, asking him to join and also to put on for them a special supper composed of the endemic foods of his country. There was a letter telling him the number of his office and enclosing a key to it; there was a letter containing parking permission for his car; there was a temporary identification card, with a notice asking him to keep this until he had a permanent identity. There were several social invitations. There was a package of forms which constituted his contract with the university. ‘All the bumf,’ said Bourbon. ‘We got plenty of that. Have to give those IBM machines something to do. I was a number for the IBM. Well, boy, what say we go take a look at your office? We got nice rooms here, but I’m afraid we got to ask faculty members to share. Let’s see, who’d I put you in with?’

  They stopped at a door which had Walker’s name at the bottom of a list of four. The other three names were Luther Stewart, William Van Hart, Jnr, and Dr Bernard Froelich; Bourbon read them to him, rather laboriously. ‘Sounds like there’s someone here now,’ he said, and opened the door. Inside there were three persons who were playing a game. Having placed a wastebasket on top of a large bookcase, filled with fat, pretentious texts, they were playing a kind of basketball which involved landing squeezed-up balls of paper in the bucket. ‘Hell, I hope this isn’t a student,’ said Bernard Froelich as they came in; he was standing on a desk reaching into the basket. ‘Oh, hi, Harris! And Jamie, well, good to see you.’

  ‘So this is what you boys do,’ said Bourbon, standing at the door and looking a little sour.

  ‘We try to keep in trim,’ said Froelich. ‘Too many constipated teachers around these days.’ He got down off the table and clasped Walker’s arm. ‘Men, I want you to meet our new writer. You all know his name, now this is the face that goes with it. Luther Stewart.’

  Stewart was a large, thin young man with a small moustache, wearing a kerchief in the neck of his tattersall shirt. ‘I’m very glad to know you. I’ve got a whole pile of questions I want to ask you sometime.’

  ‘Fine,’ said Walker.

  ‘William Van Hart, here,’ said Froelich.

  ‘How do you do, Mr Walker?’ said William Van Hart, who was tall, elegant and rather sophisticated. ‘Thank God we’ve got someone intelligent out here at last.’

  Bourbon, who was still standing in the door, as if he feared to be assassinated if he advanced any further, interrupted: ‘I think we ought to be getting over there to the Faculty Club. You boys will have plenty of time to talk to Mis’ Walker.’

  ‘We look forward to that,’ said Luther Stewart.

  ‘See you soon, Jamie,’ said Bernard Froelich. As they walked out of the English Building, and into the heat of the campus at noon, Dr Bourbon said, ‘You know, boy, these young kids come out here from the east, read Cassirer and Buber and all that stuff, they’re pretty darn sure of themselves. They think they’re mighty good. Tain’t always so. I always make it my rule, beware of intellectual arrogance. Now take me, I’m a scholar. That’s what I’ll be hung for. But these boys, know what they are?’

  ‘No,’ said Walker.

  ‘Critics!’ said Bourbon in some disgust. ‘That means they can go around spoutin’ their own opinions all the time as much as they want, without ever havin’ to check a fact. Needn’t use the library ever.’

  The campus path they had been following now brought them out at the Faculty Club, a small and elegant stone building with a hotel-like marquee over the entrance door. Donnish men, lit by green table-lamps, could be seen discoursing wisely within, and Walker felt, with some nervousness, that he was entering hallowed academic ground. Bourbon held the door open with his foot while Walker passed through, and then led him into the urinal. Here, with one hand against the wall, he sang ‘Git Along Little Dogie’; his good spirits had evidently returned after the short spell of personal doubt. ‘Oh, shoot,’ he suddenly said, ‘fergot to ask Froelich about that rear fender.’ The thought occupied him for a moment. ‘Of course,’ he went on, ‘bein’ a scholar in this country, and this part of the
country, it’s a burden, Mis’ Walker, and part of the pain is the problem of not bein’ understood.’ As he spoke he took two ties out of his pocket and handed one of them to Walker. ‘We’re formal here,’ he said. When the ties were on they went through into the lounge. ‘What can I git you to drink?’ asked Bourbon. ‘All we’re allowed to sell here is 2.5 beer. That to your palate at all?’

  ‘Fine,’ said Walker. Bourbon went over to the bar, where an elegant student in a white shirt and a string tie was pouring beer from cans into glasses. Walker sat in his armchair and straightened the creases in his trousers. Then he picked up the student newspaper from the table in front of him; ‘BAU students arraigned on drug charges,’ said the banner. Suddenly he looked up and there in front of him was Dr Jochum, looking smaller, more American, less sure of himself. Jochum brought back Julie Snowflake and Miss Marrow and a lot of old sensations.

  ‘Vell, this is a good surprise,’ said Jochum.

  ‘It certainly is,’ said Walker.

  ‘And tell me how is Party?’ asked Jochum, sitting down. ‘Is it not all I said it was?’

  ‘It is.’

  ‘And is America up to your expectation? Is the freedom all you wanted?’

  ‘Oh, it’s much too early to say. I haven’t even started being free yet.’

  ‘And what happened to our little American innocent?’ Jochum asked.

  ‘Miss Snowflake? Now that I don’t know. I called her in New York but she was away.’

  ‘Vell, the thing about America is that there is plenty of everything for everyone. That is why we all come here. Is America being a good host to you?’

  ‘Ah, he can’t answer that,’ said Bourbon, returning with the drinks. ‘He’s house-guestin’ with me.’

  ‘Oh, then he is being very vell received,’ said Dr Jochum, smiling. ‘Of course it was not this vay, you understand, when I first came. I spoke almost no English. I was another refugee. Who was to pick out Jochum? My books were not translated. I had written no distinguished novels. But America gave me what I did not have; that was a country. So that is why I am grateful.’