Stepping Westward

by Malcolm Bradbury

  ‘Hello,’ said Walker.

  ‘Come for a dish of tea?’

  ‘Yes.’

  ‘How’s the Queen?’

  ‘Very well, thank you.’

  ‘You know,’ said Hamish, ‘the last big lecture we had of this kind was when Auden, that’s W. H. Auden, came through. Lectured in a tweed hat. It was brilliant.’

  ‘I’m afraid you’ll be disappointed tonight, then.’

  ‘Not at all, old boy. Keep your pecker up, what?’

  ‘All right,’ said Walker.

  ‘You know, Jamie, you won’t be aware of this, you think of me as the Head of Comp. here, which I am now . . . but I’m really an Auden scholar. Only I had to quit. I’ll tell you why. I got this terrible feeling that even he hadn’t looked at his own poems as carefully as I had. And, you know, it’s an amazing sensation – you feel you’ve gone further into another man’s mind than he has.’

  ‘You felt more like Auden than he is?’

  ‘Right. That was it precisely. So . . . I quit and took on the Comp. programme. But I still retain my interest in the English. That’s why it’s great to have you speak to us.’

  ‘I see,’ said Walker.

  ‘You don’t have a tweed hat? Well, that’s a pity, a lot of the kids will be watching for a tweed hat. Ah well, pip pip, old boy.’

  Walker filled his tray and sat down. He sat next to Bernard Froelich, hoping for comfort. ‘Hi hi,’ said Froelich.

  ‘This is turning into quite an occasion, isn’t it?’ said Walker, trying to keep the tray steady on his knee. ‘The only disappointment will be the actual lecture.’

  ‘Oh, you’re safe, you’re an authority. You became an authority by leaving home. In England there are fifty of you; in Party you’re the only one of the kind. So we give you martinis and potato salad and we’ll all come to look and see what you wear and what shape your head is.’

  ‘I see, they won’t listen to me.’

  ‘Oh, they’ll drink in your nonsense as words of wisdom,’ said Froelich, encouragingly. ‘That’s why you have so much moral power around here. That’s why you can take a special stand on the loyalty oath issue.’

  Walker looked around to see whether anyone was listening, but though they were at the heart of a crowd no one visibly was. ‘I think I’ve solved that,’ said Walker, ‘I shall simply not sign and hope that no one notices.’

  ‘A secret protest,’ said Froelich. ‘A sneaky way round the existential dilemma. The only trouble is that it’s no good.’

  ‘Why not?’ asked Walker.

  ‘Well, do you want a political answer or a moral answer or a religious answer? Look, I’ll tell you. It’s no good because you’re an authority, as we’ve said. That means you’re a charismatic figure. You’re a psychopomp, a public conscience. You’ve been appointed. So now you have to grow up beyond morality in secret. You have to stand up and be counted. You have to state your beliefs, because people want to hear them and you want people to hear them.’

  ‘But I don’t, I happen to believe in privacy of choice.’

  ‘A writer who believes in privacy of choice. You know, privacy, I thought we’d vanquished that concept. We’re members one of another; we’re social beings; we’re political animals.’

  ‘I’m not, I never liked Joan of Arc; I’ve always thought sainthood was too public. I want to do what I think right, but I do it to please me. I don’t want that exploited, I don’t want to change the world.’

  ‘You want to act without consequences. Well, I don’t think that opportunity has ever been vouchsafed.’

  ‘Oh, I’ve managed pretty well so far, and I shall keep on trying until I’m stopped. All I want on my headstone are just three fine words: “He eschewed definition.” ’

  ‘I suppose that’s what’s called liberalism in England.’

  ‘In a way, yes.’

  ‘It sounds like self-hatred to me,’ said Froelich. ‘It’s a logical inconsistency, and it will beat you yet, James.’

  ‘It may, but it hasn’t.’

  ‘You don’t believe in yourself, you don’t accept what you do, is that it?’

  ‘I believe in it personally, but I’m not a causes man. I don’t believe that what is right for one is right for all.’

  ‘You want your own salvation but everybody else ought to go to the devil,’ said Froelich. ‘I get it.’

  At this moment the President came over to the couch where they were sitting. ‘Well, now, look, fine,’ he said to Walker. ‘I think we ought to be getting on over to Fogle. I’ve got your biog. right here, Walk, and I’m going to give a welcome and a biog. and then it’s yours. Got your script?’ Walker picked up the script and put down his unfinished meal. He felt cold in the stomach. ‘I’m going to take you over in my car and then we’ll rest a moment when we get there and let the others take their places.’ Coolidge led the way outside and they got together into his car. ‘I’d reckon about an hour’s spiel, then a pause of about five minutes to let people who want to get up and move around, and then, if you’re amenable, we’ll take a question or two. I put out a glass of water on the podium, and don’t forget to speak into the mike because we’re taping it.’ Coolidge drove through the darkening campus and stopped at the rear entrance to Fogle. He led Walker through a backstage and property-room section and showed him a lavatory. Then it was time to begin.

  The Fogle Auditorium, which could accommodate about three thousand people, was a vast series of tiered crescents with plushy green seats. The audience for his lecture comprised about eight hundred people, clustered together just below the stage. As they went on to the platform, an organ was intoning, sombrely, ‘Abide with Me’. The organ stopped and the platform party sat down, three chairs behind a large speaker’s desk from which innumerable microphones bristled. To one side of it was a limp American flag. Below the platform a student crouched with a tape-recorder. Then came the audience, in which Walker, though nervous with fear, could vaguely discern the features of Bourbon, Froelich, Dr Jochum and Cindy Handlin. In the front row was the Mayor of Party, who had somehow acquired an Alsatian dog, and the men of the press, including the reporter from the Party Bugle whom Walker now detested. After a long silent pause, while audience and Walker looked at one another, President Coolidge rose and went to the desk. ‘Ladies and gentlemen,’ he said. ‘In the eighteenth century, I guess it was, it was the custom of important men, men in power, to employ the services of a professional hermit. This guy sat in rags in a grotto and he offered, well, a practical demonstration of the virtues of solitude. The rich men employed him as a kind of cure for their consciences. These worldly fellows led practical lives, you see, but they could imagine another kind of life that was dedicated to more, well, spiritual things. Today, ladies and gentlemen, we, the universities of America, are the new patrons of these hermits. Now sitting with me on the platform tonight is BAU’s own hermit for the year. His name’s James Walker and he’s an important, a very important, English writer. We have a writer here at BAU so that he can live with us and we can examine him and look at a less practical kind of life than the one we live in the modern world of today. It is in this belief that the creative is no less important than the practical that we welcome James Walker, author of three novels, a writer of no mean repute, to this campus and this country. Mr Walker is not only a great writer but a great Am . . . great Englishman. I’ll ask him to speak to us now on, ah, on The Writer’s Dilemma.’ The audience applauded and so did the President. Then, standing at the desk, he summoned Walker over with an outstretched arm and put something – a laurel bay? No, it was a microphone – round his neck. The applause died and Walker was alone.

  He looked down at his speech in the blue folder. The first page of the typescript said neatly The Writer’s Dilemma. After that followed reams of windy persiflage, hammered out in the security of isolation. He looked at it, then out at the audience, and then decided to stray away from the text. It was a decision of panic and fear, and he knew that he would
regret it. A curious sense of utter freedom came over him; he felt that he could say whatever he liked, that nothing would be remembered, that there was no one real here but him. He thought about the real writer’s dilemma, which was that you had to come from the right class, be able to hold your liquor, know how to undo a brassiere at the back first go, and have the courage to stay away from lectures you might be invited to give on the subject of your dilemma. But it was too late to know that now.

  ‘Well,’ said Walker, ‘I’ve been asked to speak tonight on the writer’s dilemma, and the way the topic was put to me made it evident that it was taken for granted that dilemmas were things no decent modern writer could afford to be seen without. I don’t deny that writers do have dilemmas, and that there are more dilemmas than ever for writers to have. As I look at you all out there, sitting in those nice green seats, all come out from your warm houses and apartments, I can’t help but feel grateful that you should turn out, when you needn’t, to listen to me talking about my dilemma. I ask myself, would I come out and listen to yours? Would I ever hold still on a bar-stool long enough to hear about the dentist’s dilemma? Or the doctor’s dilemma? I have a nasty feeling that I wouldn’t. What makes the writer’s dilemma so interesting or important I don’t care to think. But I’m touched and grateful for the goodwill and generosity with which the matter is treated. Here am I. For the first time in several years I have a new suit, this is it, bought me by this college. I have a new pen, a Madras watch-strap, a new pair of socks. My thinking has been stretched. My attitudes have changed and expanded. I can’t grumble. What dilemma?’

  A flashlight bulb exploded and the Mayor’s dog growled. Walker found himself more confused than ever. He tried to grasp for something. ‘The writer’s dilemma today is, it seems to me, every man’s dilemma, sharpened for certain evident reasons, due to the writer’s social location and the commitments that literature as a profession puts on him. The writer today is talked of as an outsider. He is called disoriented and disgruntled. But was he ever the inside man, the loyalist, the patriot? Was he ever oriented? Was he ever, well, gruntled? Literature, it seems to me, has always, or for a long time, demanded that writers be concerned with matters of conduct and good living. I suppose if I have a dilemma it’s not meeting up to the ethical demands of the profession, because of course we are more confused about good living than ever. We know too much; we know the falsity that lies behind our professions of honesty, the vanity that lies behind our moral stance.’ Walker thought he had talked enough now, and looked at his watch; there were forty-five minutes more to go. He took a glass of water and caught the face of Dr Jochum, looking wryly at him. He smiled. He found a few more things to say about his moral confusion; that it did not distinguish him from other men, that only because he thought of himself as a writer did he feel justified in talking about it at all. He located a clock on the side wall and watched its fingers turn slowly. He observed, as he talked, the spinning wheels of the tape-recorder on the ground just below his podium. He was talking, he found, about the complexities of commitment and of attitude in the modern world, which was now no longer national but international. ‘I have to come to America,’ he said, ‘to be called a writer, to feel like a writer at all. And that raises the question of what it is that today we owe to the imagination. Should we let it bring us away like this, from our wives and our children and our hearths? Should we all have stopped at home? I don’t know. Perhaps there are things we should put first – other loyalties. But I do think this. If we are going to show our piety to the liberal ideal of the writer, the disinterested man, and have him in our universities and have him lecture to us about his dilemma, then we have to do it freely. I came here for the chance to be uncommitted; it was a marvellous chance, and I’m proud to be here, I suppose. Yes, I think I am. It was very disloyal of me to come, really. But I came to be loyal to being a writer. That means not being limited. As I say, I’m not sure whether this is a good commitment. But if you think enough of it to ask me here, then don’t limit it at all by anything like, well, the loyalty oath that I have on my desk in my apartment. That’s a mistake.’

  Walker hadn’t really intended to say this, and he was surprised that his own mouth should have come round to this position before his heart did. He paused a moment, and then noticed that there was some confusion in the audience. The Mayor of Party was sweeping out, tugging at his dog. There were several rapid flashlight shots, one of the audience and not of him at all. One or two people were talking, and the press was writing furiously. An old lady seemed to be hitting someone with her purse. More people followed the Mayor down the aisle. On-stage, the President appeared to be pushing back his chair away from Walker. All Walker could think of was that he had to keep going for thirty more minutes; he used the pause to think of more things to say. It occurred to him that the argument against what he had just said might be the argument that Jochum used: that the speciality of liberalism is the betrayal of the society in which liberalism is permitted to exist. He went on to argue with this one, pointing out that he himself wasn’t dangerous to anyone. He could quite see that there were others who might be: that the danger of freedom of ideas, the possibility of literary commitment and disinterestedness, was that it gave equal freedom to non-ideas, to the free play of the stupid cause or the stupid assertion. There were never any guarantees that bad ideas wouldn’t drive out good. But the bad ideas came equally from both sides, and had their own variants on repression. He talked about this a bit more and then it was time to close. So he said: ‘Well, that’s my dilemma. I think I want freedom and I shall take it if you give it me. That’s what I came to America for. You might like my dilemma or you might not. All I’m saying is that it is, in a way, yours too. I just hope it’s been worth talking about.’ He walked backwards from the podium and sat down. The audience seemed to be slightly relieved. They applauded politely, save for one or two who sat silent. Only in the second row was there slight uproar. It was Cindy Handlin, who had risen to give him a standing ovation.

  BOOK THREE

  They came largely to get away – that most simple of motives. To get away. Away from what? In the long run, away from themselves. Away from everything. That’s why most people have come to America, and still do come. To get away from everything they are and have been.

  ‘Henceforth be masterless.’

  Which is all very well, but it isn’t freedom.

  – D. H. Lawrence

  7

  WHEN PEOPLE asked Bernard Froelich why he had gone into the academic life, he usually answered, ‘Oh, for the prestige, the power.’ It was a joke, but a half-true one. He had always been an ambitious man. When he went to the east coast college where he had done his undergraduate and graduate work, a college with many intellectual but few social attainments and a student body composed of enterprising socially mobile Jewish boys like himself, he had seen himself ending up in one of the more prestigious professions; he should have been a doctor or a rabbi. Something – probably success – had diverted him into university teaching; something – probably ignorance – had brought him out west to do it. Once in Party, he had found himself happy in the west; at the same time, his glances went eastward frequently, and it was for this reason, in part, that he had grown into Anglophilia. He had a generic liking for the English; he liked them because they came not out of the woods but out of a culture. However, there was only so much room in the spirit for Anglophilia to take up; and Froelich had larger causes. He had, therefore, a wealth of ends in view when, that spring day, sitting next to Selena May Sugar at the meeting to appoint the next Creative Writing Fellow, he had proposed the name of James Walker. There had been the thought of the service he could do for the book he was writing. There was the desire to bring into the English Department a concealed bomb or catalyst, a disintegrator and changer who would explode in faculty meetings and in the classrooms and somehow dislodge the world of dullness and fog that Bourbon swirled around in, and so bring prestige to himself and his caus
e. There was, too, the desire to bring into Party’s frontier plainness a soul-mate, a portion of the loveliness he had left behind back east, a man who could also recall to him the good days in London, could recall the Earl’s Court flat and the one-bar gas fire and the walks down Petticoat Lane and the nightly struggles to buy potatoes after six in the evening.

  And then, also, there was a reverse impulse – an impulse to do something to that same England. For, sitting there on their island, the English had seemed to him a settled race, a race that had taken the things of the mind for granted and lived easily with them, a race that had acquired forms for living and had assumed that concert halls and bookshops and libraries and writers were permanent and eternal – a race, in short, that hadn’t faced the future. And Froelich had wanted to put that kind of view to the test, to see what would happen to it in a place where things of the mind could only be appendages. The faculty of the English Department at Benedict Arnold looked impressive in their classrooms as they discoursed on Dickens and Dostoevsky and Blake, clad in their tweed suits, smoking their pipes, thinking up their articles for PMLA. For part of the time, at least, they might have been at Harvard or Oxford. But what a veneer it all was! On weekends they put on Levi’s and went up to their cabins in the canyon to clear snow, fish in creeks, and saw logs for their stoves. They became deeply ambiguous men, who looked at the world with two faces, the man and the mask. Froelich’s image for the type was Dr Bourbon, who could be seen, still in his Rhodes Scholar’s tweeds, shooting at bottles in his backyard with a six-gun after a day of classes. It was the thought that the English wore their disguises all the time, had no sense of independent self, so to speak, that helped to motivate Froelich. He wanted to confront an Englishman with confusion, and see what part of the equation would change.

  The disappointment he had felt on Walker’s arrival, the sense he had then had of the moral and emotional tiredness of the man, had waned a little in the following weeks. It seemed to him that it would be Walker, and not Party, who would change. It was a despairing notion, because he had hoped for the other thing, hoped to see Bourbon’s head drop in shame and the department realize that it had to turn its face toward the east from which he himself came. He had watched Walker carefully, over those weeks, as he threshed and flailed, watched his every assurance and his every embarrassment. He felt that he had offered this man a whole new world and he wondered what he would make of it. He, Froelich, had brought him to Party, given him joys and tortures and problems. He had given him work, dinner, and was prepared to do more; Walker was, he decided, of the same spirit as Froelich, and whatever he wanted – Froelich’s home, his work, his wife – he could have. He felt the kinship between them grow daily. When Walker had grasped at the loyalty oath question, he had felt that the intellectual world of liberalism was awake in Party at last. And when Walker, perplexed, had come to him before his lecture, Froelich had glowed, counting the threads he had tied. He had tried to follow and to lead; to show the way and let the way be found. Walker’s very English brand of liberalism, a faith of unbelief, struck Froelich as a cultural artefact. Its most committed assumption seemed to be that you shouldn’t do anything to anybody because people, and the world, like to be the way they are. Froelich’s own liberalism was more militant, as, in America, it had to be; the English had not had to fight for it for a very long time, and they didn’t recognize, even now, that the odds were against them, that every freedom, every cultural moment, had to be won by political energy. Walker, left without a sense of society or of historical change, could speak only out of himself. He was striving for no future; he held only on to a past that was familiar enough in his own land but sounded like the voice of a ghost out here on the plains. He had a function to play in relation to Walker’s sublime subjectivism; he was objectivity, history, leading him on.