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Overview
English author James Walker has three books to his name, each greeted with middling success and then promptly forgotten. But his résumé is significant enough to earn him a yearlong appointment at Benedict Arnold University as the American college’s writer in residence.
At Benedict Arnold, Walker is something of a celebrity—a firebrand of 1960s British literary culture whose work, though perhaps met with shrugs at home, is the subject of vibrant scholarly criticism among American academics. Walker, of course, is not quite what some were expecting, and culture clashes abound as he encounters the tropes of American academia in the sixties. Fusty, buttoned-up professors, spirited advocates of free love, and aggressively ambitious colleagues collide to ensure that Walker’s year in America will be anything but ordinary.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781504005388 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | Open Road Media |
| Publication date: | 05/19/2015 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 388 |
| Sales rank: | 921,631 |
| File size: | 2 MB |
About the Author
Read an Excerpt
Stepping Westward
A Novel
By Malcolm Bradbury
OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA
Copyright © 1983 Malcolm BradburyAll rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-1-5040-0538-8
CHAPTER 1
THE POST ALWAYS came late to the house in Nottingham where the Walkers had a top-floor flat. By the time the postman appeared, pushing his way through the vast banks of rhododendrons that filled the untended garden, the other dwellers in the house—habitual art students, librarians, teachers who put Labour Party posters in their windows at election time and then suddenly voted Liberal—had all long since gone. Elaine Walker rose early, got their child ready for school, took her there on a baby-seat attached to the rear of her bicycle, and was already at work on the morning shift at the hospital by the time the letters flopped through into the basket behind the glass-panelled front door. Only one man was on the premises; only one man heard the sound and was stirred by it. This was James Walker, a stout, slightly thyroidic, very shambling person in his early thirties, victimized by the need for twelve hours' sleep a day; it always fetched him out of bed, promising good fortune, another acceptance, another invitation. Why did he bother? He was a tired, lazy person, far enough from youth to be bored by new mornings. Only literacy and indignation kept him alive; the books he wrote in the silent flat were harsh, desperate messages of his impulse to marry with the world. He had a hard time of it with the day-to-day, but the little slot of the letterbox was a hole in his universe that left room for the unexpected. So he stumbled down the stairs, a glow on his stocky, lugubrious face, and went, in brown corduroy slippers, to meet possibility.
When the American letter arrived he saw at once that it was impressive. It hung in the wire basket, an envelope of crinkly blue paper, its edges striped navy and red, franked with an enormous stamp, emblemed with the university crest (Benedictus Benedice) in a delicate grey. He took it upstairs and got back into bed with it, pulling the covers over himself to keep warm. Elaine always left him a flask of coffee; he poured some out into the beaker, took a sip to bring freshness, and then slit the envelope with his thumb and took out the inside sheet. It was a sheet of expensive ripple paper, typed in that strange new typeface that only very modern typewriters affect, and it told him, in short, that he was wanted. A request from the world! He sat up in bed and cried, 'My God!' He felt warmed, excited, because though he had long held to one of the most fundamental of all literary convictions, that the world owed him a living, he felt curiously disturbed now that it seemed to be offering him one. He got out of bed again, hair tousled, and lit a cigarette, wondering what he should do. It seemed to him, at first thought, that he was ready for this. A break in the universal silence, an opportunity! Here was an invitation to be what he secretly had been for so long, a writer. Though a far from diligent creature, he had now written three novels, all of them described by the weekend reviewers as promising. He had been mentioned in a few articles, and it was evident that there must be a small audience for whom he stood for something. The problem was that he had no idea who this audience was; he had never been clearly accosted by it before. His novels had made him a little money, more than enough to cover the costs of the paper he typed them on and the cigarettes he smoked while he wrote them. They dealt with heroes like himself, sensitive provincial types to whom fate had dealt a cruel blow, for whom life was too plain and ordinary to be worth much at all. In the last pages, the heroes, trapped by their remoteness from history, died or made loud perorations about social corruption. They spoke of the impulse to be better, to lead meaningful lives and, written at the kitchen table he used as a desk, as he looked out at a bored tree, they came out of his heart.
These books had appeared in the United States as well as in England, and it had often struck him as odd that it was from America that most of the few letters he received, most of the invitations to write on his theories of literature or the personal misfortunes that had made him as he was, should come. American glossy magazines with large circulations and advertisements for very complicated corsets printed, between the corsets, the short stories that in England no one would look at; and college textbooks with titles like The Ten Best English Stories About Class reprinted them and sent fees. The American (but not the English) edition of Vogue had mentioned him in their 'People are Talking About ...' column, and he had come to believe that in that foreign land (but not in England) people were. What did they say? It didn't matter; they spoke. Time had written him up, printed his photograph, called him 'bird-eyed, balding'. The Buffalo Public Library had bought his manuscripts, which he rewrote for the occasion, since he had destroyed them. Girls wrote him letters, and one ambitious youth in Idaho had proposed to write a thesis on him. Editors and publishers, wrote his American agent, Ellis Tilly, were dying to meet him. And this is me, he used to think, as he carried coal up two flights of stairs, really me. The letter now converted all these hints and promises into something larger, an offer. It said, You count, you exist. It came at the right time; he knew, as he lay in bed in the morning, that he had to stop being promising pretty soon, and become important, or all the fire would go out. He had to flower, to burgeon.
The time was in all ways ripe. The two part-time jobs with which he had until lately filled out his life were coming to an unexpected end. For two years he had been teaching, in the Georgian premises of the Adult Education Centre on Shakespeare Street, an ambling, inconsequential class on modern literature to a group of day-release clergymen. Across the road was the now emptied University College where Lawrence had gone; he could see it from the window as he debated on the disease-imagery of Women in Love. But the group had dwindled, out of boredom or offence, and had now gone. He also used to wear, for a pittance, experimental socks for a local knitwear firm, but a scientific advance had ousted him. Now all he did was to write, alone in the flat, until Elaine came home in the later afternoon, bringing Amanda with her. When he thought about his life, it seemed to him resourceless and minute. The realities he lived among gave nothing back, and he imagined a universe of energy in which he might find himself at home. Now he stood at the window and looked down, through the steaming chimney-pots, at the city centre, with its spires and chimneys, the round dome of the Council House, the squat shape of the castle, the tooth-like slab of the technical college, the high cranes standing webbily up where bookshops were being replaced by office-blocks; the city stood in a bowl, like old flowers, and he felt that its provincial mist had seeped into his soul and stayed there, a standing, always forecast fog. The rain blew in his heart as well as outside the windows. A blackbird, wedged in the budding tree in front of him, sang a spring song; he felt his own need for new leaves. But the sap, indoors, in here, had stopped flowing. He took the letter and went through into the living room, dense with last night's cigarette smoke. Here they were—his radio, his table-lamps, his coal-bucket, his armchair, the sum total of his visible achievement. A toy panda lay on its face on the hearthrug, as if it was being sick. He recalled an old vitality and felt that environment had squeezed it from him; he seemed to suffer from sleeping sickness or, like the potted plants on the windowsill, from wilt.
But by contrast the letter in his hand wriggled with life. Ah, an envoy! It offered a promise of esteem, a taste of freedom, and a passable salary for being free. And freedom—that meant something to Walker. He shared in his heart, and with energy, the intellectual conviction that tells us we have a big debt to pay off to anarchy for all the civilization we have gathered around us. Disorder he willingly waved forward. For he felt not only bored by what he did, but guilty for it too. Art was life; it was written out of growth, and he had none. And didn't freedom and anarchy and growth cluster together when the word America was mentioned? A lot of young writers went to America now; in fact, all of them did; it was a necessary apprenticeship. Ought one to reject possibility, or even resist the trend? He belonged, after all, to a generation of literary men, all of whom, thanks to a common educational system and a common social experience, had exactly the same head, buzzing with exactly the same thoughts. It was a virtual guarantee of success, then, that others had been. He dropped the letter on his desk, piled with five first chapters of an evidently unworkable novel, and walked round the room in a burst of excitement, seeing new landscapes in which mesas and skyscrapers mingled together in improbable confusion. Give yourself, said his heart, spend some spirit. But what was there to spend? And how, day-to-day, would it be? No, he was lost; he would have to ask Elaine.
The thought, once thought of, complicated the matter. It was known, even to him, that he was a married man. And Elaine, who had a sick mother to whom she dutifully fed Brand's Essence, would not leave her; that he knew. Intellectual temptations were not the stuff of her world. And Walker hardly felt that he could manage without her; on the other hand, he realized, with some suddenness, that he wanted to try. The eight years of his marriage had been exactly like the life of a foreigner in England; everything had been comfortable, domestic, snug, but kicking and screaming of the spirit occurred regularly as one thought of the real world outside. Walker had, in his young days, been something of a wild young man; he used to sit in coffee bars, wearing a small, dissident beard, and occasionally he would meet and seduce young groping girls whose parents had annoyed them. He would go to wild parties and walk home late at night through the suburbs, kicking over milk bottles. That was all gone but not forgotten. He had met Elaine about three years after he had taken his degree at the university, met her at a dance. At this time he was still leading a life of furtive studenthood; he had found out that one of the things about a university was that no one stopped you going in, so even then he had gone on attending, playing bridge with the students, using the library, often sleeping in the university grounds. It had been the ideal creative life, though at that time he had not actually written anything; just being a writer was enough.
The writing itself came later, with respectability, after he had met Elaine. She was a big unexpected girl who had been imported in a busload from a nurses' home to attend a student dance. She wore a dress of some thick material and heavily patterned design like a sofa fabric. He didn't know why he had chosen her that evening, but within days she was expressing a deep proprietorial interest in him. She took him out to parties, bought him drinks in pubs, made him shave. Her friends, people who played tennis and drove sports cars, were his enemies; her taste for expensive drinks and travelling in taxis made him furious; he was bored and frightened by the trips she took him on into the countryside, she carrying great furry handbags that looked like folded-over foxes. He always felt that one day she would pick him up, shove him in her handbag, and click the fastening to. So she had; that was his wedding day. For their honeymoon, Walker had rented a cottage in Cornwall. Here, amid post-marital struggle and sexual euphoria, he had begun his first novel and evolved an effective method of supporting them both without income; he used to go out each night into the countryside with a long knife and reappear with a broccoli, a swede, a cabbage. But gradually the old marginal Walker, the professional student, was converted into a new figure, Walker paterfamilias, fatter, more adjusted, the owner of his own ton of coal. In bed erotic spontaneity seemed to fade under the professional demands of hygiene. 'Have you washed your hands and face?' Elaine began murmuring on the first night. 'Have you cut your nails? You're not coming to me with your socks on.' The train journey back from Cornwall advanced the process further. They sat in an open coach, near the lavatory, the door of which would not stay shut. 'Go and shut it,' said Elaine. He did so. The door swung open again. 'It's open again,' said Elaine. From Truro to London Walker tried to find a way of keeping the door shut, until finally he completed the journey in the stifling toilet with his foot against the door. 'We can't go on like this,' he said when he emerged. It seemed to him that they had.
Now the possibility of redeeming this man, in one simple gesture, went to Walker's head; he got out his raincoat, put it over his pyjamas, and ran downstairs. In the street, trolleybuses swished by in the rain. He went to the callbox, down past the greengrocer's; liberal housewives from all the other top-floor flats looked up from buying green peppers to stare at his pyjama legs, multicoloured below the gabardine, as if they represented some bawdy invitation. The telephone booth smelled of something very nasty. Walker found four pennies in his raincoat and dialled the hospital switchboard. 'I'd like to speak to Sister Walker, on Maternity; it's urgent,' he said when they answered, putting a note of pleading into his voice; you practically had to say you were giving birth in the callbox before they would connect you. There was a pause and then Elaine's voice, as professionally stiff and starchy as the uniform she wore, came on to the line. 'Maternity ward, what is it?' she said. Walker could imagine her, breathing hard, a dragon in her uniform; she still, after eight years, made him nervous. 'It's me, Jim,' he said.
'What's up?' said Elaine.
'Well,' said Walker, 'there's a letter in this morning's post.'
'Really?' said Elaine.
'I've been asked to go to America.'
'Have you?' said Elaine. 'And who by?'
'Well, some university over there is looking for a creative writing fellow and they naturally thought of me.'
'What does it mean?' said Elaine after a pause.
'Oh, I go and sit around and write creatively and they pay me seven thousand dollars for doing it.'
'I thought you always said that creative writing was ridiculous,' said Elaine.
'Well, okay, yes, I do,' said Walker. 'Still, every man has his price. Mine happens to be six thousand nine hundred dollars.'
'They just topped it,' said Elaine.
'It looks like it,' said Walker.
'Do you want to go?' Elaine then said.
This was it, and Walker knew it was; he said, 'Do I?' and then realized he was being irritating. But how did he know? He tried it another way. 'Do you?' he said. Elaine didn't speak for a moment. Walker felt his ankles getting cold. A brown dog peered into the box at him, and two small boys over the street were apparently accosting people and pointing out to them his pyjama trousers.
Elaine said, 'No, I couldn't possibly, could I? You'd have to go on your own.'
'Think about it,' said Walker.
'No,' said Elaine, 'you're the one who has to think about it. I can't go, but you mustn't let it stop you, if this really is what you want. Would it help your writing?' Elaine always said 'your writing' as other wives of generous character might have said 'your drinking', and probably in her mind the two peccadilloes were of pretty much the same order, the sort of thing you tolerated and indeed indulged. The fact that he did it all day under her constant subsidy, for it was on her salary that they both lived, made no difference whatever to her attitude, and never had; a lot of girls had husbands who wouldn't work. Walker began to read the instructions on the wall of the booth, which were for some odd reason in German, and said slowly, 'It might.'
'Well, you must consider it seriously, then.'
'Without you?'
'How long is it for?' enquired Elaine.
'A year. An academic year.'
'Well, a year away from home would probably do you a lot of good,' said Elaine. 'Perhaps you'd learn to take care of yourself a bit.'
Walker said hopefully, 'Could I manage then?'
Elaine replied, 'You could learn to try.' Then there were noises at the other end, and Elaine seemed to be shouting something in a voice that boomed off the ceiling. Presently her voice came back on the line: 'Look, ducks, must go,' she said. 'Doctor's rounds. Did you put a clean shirt on this morning?'
'I'm not dressed yet,' said Walker. As he spoke, he realized he had made a fatal move.
'You're standing naked in the phonebox?' demanded Elaine. Walker said, 'I've got my pyjamas on.'
'In the phonebox?'
'I'm wearing my raincoat on top,' said Walker.
'You're a hopeless case, Jim,' said Elaine.
'I thought,' said Walker, 'that medical rule said there were no hopeless cases.'
'I thought so too, before I met you. Well, go home, you nit, before you starve to death. And put a clean shirt on.'
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Stepping Westward by Malcolm Bradbury. Copyright © 1983 Malcolm Bradbury. Excerpted by permission of OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA.
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