PROLOGUE

THE SMALL TOWN of Party lies in the American heartland somewhere near the point where the various wests collide – where the middle west meets the far west and the south-west the north-west. That long, slowly uptilting cornfield that begins in Ohio turns to shortgrass plain, to gullies, gulches and parched mineral-bearing soil, just before it reaches the Rockies, which burst forth in a wild, pushing mass of jagged peaks. In this parched section, short of water, lacking in trees, lies Party – a town reclaimed from nothing, captured from one of the least desirable sections of the frontier. It has the air of being settled by those pioneers who were too tired to go on, who said, on sighting ahead of them the magnificent range of the Rockies, that they could take no more. The Indians who preceded them in the section were tired and debilitated, horseless cowardly braves with holes in their moccasins, without an art, without hogans, lax even in their production of arrowheads, a bore to anthropologists. The town itself has an unfinished look. A mass of trees, carefully planted, shade it from the sun in the summer and hang with snow in the winter. Its lawns, sprinkled daily during the growing season, are unnaturally green, bursting with chlorophyll, save when they disappear all winter under a cloak of snowdrift and icesheet. All these things look as if they could die at any moment. Party is a marginal sort of town, unlikely to win any contests or orbit its own satellite or be featured in Life magazine. What small reputation it does possess derives from two things – its annual rodeo, an important tourist occasion, when the motels and tourist cabins fill and cowboys lope the sidewalks; and a college called Benedict Arnold University, a curious foundation, half private, half state-owned, whose battle-mented walls and Gothic buildings rise up on the edge of Party’s best residential district, a ziggurat of culture, noble above the arid shortgrass plain.

The frontier is not forgotten in Party. The new crematorium, which advertises ashes to ashes in easy payments, was designed by a devout Miesian; but the tourist bus takes summer visitors to the old graveyard, just beyond the town limits, all of whose inhabitants seem to have met a violent death before they reached thirty. Though the obituaries in the Party Bugle record modern bourgeois deaths from coronaries, ulcers and drunken driving, the stones and crosses in the old graveyard – which say ‘shot’, ‘murdered’, ‘hanged’, ‘lynched’ and ‘died of plague’ – recall a world that some Party citizens can remember, and quite a lot of others think they can. Even today covered wagons pass through Party’s streets, bearing members of the Junior Chamber of Commerce advertising the rodeo. The Wigwam Motel consists entirely of wigwams – each containing box-spring beds and television. The banks, whose tellers wear Stackolee vests and string ties, pay out in silver dollars, in western style. With a ten-dollar order, the Piggly Wiggly supermarket regularly gives away a small bag of golddust. For rodeo time the regular inhabitants grow prospectors’ beards to celebrate their frontier heritage, causing enormous problems of conscience to the beatniks at Benedict Arnold, who, caught between two kinds of conformity, never know whether they should shave their beards or not. Last year there was an unhappy moment over rodeo time when a dope-pusher from Berkeley who was trying to make a connection with the guitar-player at Lucky’s Place found himself offering a fix to the newly bearded president of the First National Bank, a leading rightist who had once tried to have Benedict Arnold closed down on the grounds that education was by its very nature subversive. This did nothing to improve relations between college and town. But then, nothing ever did. Steady warfare engaged the columns of the Party Bugle as the citizens tried to drive the college away from the town and the students tried to drive the town away from the college.

But if the town, with its low buildings and, in places, its old wooden sidewalks, gives the impression of impermanence, the campus gives the opposite feeling – of too much solidity. Its buildings are so very ponderous, so ungraciously traditional, that Dr Styliapolis, head of the Department of Architecture, told his students, shortly after arriving in Party from an eastern, Ivy League school, that he had written direct to the Kremlin to ask them to be included in their list of strategic targets. Thrump Hall, the biggest girls’ dormitory, is modelled externally on Hampton Court, with green bronzed caps on the towers, but, as the President points out, ‘not so gloomy’; panties hang out of the arrow slits on the days of the big football games. The Student Union, on the other hand, is a direct imitation of King’s College Chapel, Cambridge, though exigencies of the site made it rather narrower and twice as long. Ye Bookshoppe is an enlarged version of Anne Hathaway’s Cottage. Most striking of all, though, is the Administration Building, provided by an eclectic, cosmopolitan architect with a tower from a French château, a bastion from a German schloss, a turret from an Italian castello, and a minaret from the Taj Mahal. Dr Styliapolis habitually takes his students on a tour of these buildings, pointing out the contrast of terrain and style, commenting on the way in which they symbolize the American capacity to draw upon world thought; then he goes into a lather of rage and describes them as ‘a triumph of the spoiler’s art, notice, a manifestation of architectural lunacy. Beware, beware’. He does, on the other hand, praise another kind of architecture which has more recently made its mark on campus, the mark of international modernismus. There is an auditorium, built in the shape of a hamburger, which can be totally dismantled for change of needs and rebuilt in the shape of a hot-dog. There is the chapel, which is bell-shaped, and, being suspended from a gantry, does not touch the ground at all, except when it goes into orbit in times of high wind. Each kind of building has its own adherents among the faculty, which, like all faculties, is divided between conservatives and radicals, and which, like all faculties, comes to the boil at least once a year in a spate of petitions and accusations and calumny.

But there is one man to whom every brick, in every style, is dear; there is one man who can embrace all causes and faiths and styles of heart and stay sane and comfortable. The name of this man is President Coolidge – Ralph Zugsmith Coolidge, president of Benedict Arnold these last five years. A craggy, heavy-browed, middle-aged man with the brightness and innocence and spirit of the very young, President Coolidge is that rare thing, a totally eclectic human being. That is why he is here, that is why he succeeds. If the tradition of Whitmanesque acceptance seems to be dying, Coolidge proves in person that it is not yet dead. One scathing faculty member, an urbane man named Dean French, said of Coolidge once, on the only occasion when the President was late for a meeting (he had just broken his arm testing some physical education equipment), that Coolidge’s moral powers had shrivelled at the age of six and all that remained was sheer verbal fluency; he was no thoughts and all words. But even Dean French knew this was unfair; it was clear that Coolidge was a man who loves. He had come to his post from an executive position with one of the big insurance companies, came, saw, and was conquered; his heart had leapt and he proposed marriage on the spot. He came at a time of troubles, when the previous president had resigned and no one seemed minded to take on a job which involved him in immediate hostilities with the state and the faculty. Coolidge had taken it all in his stride; the university had wowed him. All that lay within it won his care and attention; he appointed his janitors with the same attentiveness, and the same dependence on the fashionable insights of personal analysis, as he did his professors. The colour of every new garbage can was as much an issue with him as the installation of the new cyclotron. He was bland with the faculty, bland with the state, bland with the world. In any disinterested evaluative scale of American colleges, Benedict Arnold hardly ranks top; to Coolidge it was more scholarly than Harvard, better built than Yale, more socially attractive than Princeton, and with better parking facilities than all of them. The student body, as it teemed about campus – very much body, the girls in their shorts, the boys in theirs – he saw from his window as young America, the best of all possible young Americans. No possible evidence of ignorance or of vice could disillusion him. Responsibility to them and to the world weighed on his head, like an over-large hat. He was totally serious; he groaned in the night; he cared and worried. He ran advertisements in the quality monthlies: ‘For the future! A BA from B.A.’ He shivered when Harvard got Reisman or Toronto Frye, shivered because he saw a prospective Benedict Arnold man drawn off into false paths.

The absence of any previous university experience whatsoever prevented him from being embarrassed by standards. Yet even so, Benedict Arnold managed to grow and thrive. It was, perhaps, because the region had a highly regenerative climate, and because the sky-slopes of the Rockies were only four hours’ drive away, rather than because of Coolidge’s efforts; but Benedict Arnold continued to attract a large and reasonably good staff and student body. It managed to hold concurrently the reputation of ‘a play school’ and a good place to be. A lot of students came to Benedict Arnold because they were weakly, and their doctors recommended it (Coolidge had the wit to advertise also in medical journals). Similar reasons of health and geography, together with a high salary scale, enabled it to claim some good faculty talent. Tubercular biologists, rheumatic physicists, asthmatic sociologists and rickety soil-mechanics men abounded in its departments, coughing their way through the laboratories or limping down the corridors. But as President Coolidge often said, looking out of the window of his suite at the campus spectacle, a lot of intellectuals have been sick.

Then there were other attractions. The excellence of the Physics Department is supposedly accounted for by the fact that, during one short-lived phase in post-war history, Party was outside missile-range. Even the English Department, in a state not noticeably teeming with literacy, had a high reputation, firstly because an enterprising member of that faculty, since gone into the advertising business, conceived the idea of approaching living poets and novelists and asking them, not for their cast-off manuscripts, which came expensive, but for their cast-off clothes, which are to be seen, displayed on facsimile dummies, in a small museum in the library; and secondly because it is in the custom of taking on, each year, a writer-in-residence – a young poet or novelist, who usually, after or even before the expiration of his term of duty, writes a novel in which the university and many of its faculty appear in print under only the faintest of disguises. This has resulted in enormous publicity for the college, and President Coolidge keeps a collection of these works in his office and sends out to his friends cyclostyled excerpts of passages which refer, usually unfavourably, to himself. ‘I think we’re making our mark with this little experiment, you know,’ he would say. ‘My guess is that it’s boosted enrolment around twenty per cent. Kids like coming here after reading those books. It’s like visiting Dove Cottage in Wordsworth’s Lake District.’

This year, the meeting that was convened to appoint the new creative writing fellow took place, in one of the conference rooms in the Taj Mahal wing of the Administration Building, over a lunch hour toward the end of March. The lunch-hour conference was one of President Coolidge’s innovations; it had hotted up the pace of faculty life considerably. The previous president, an easy, rotund spirit who had reached the post internally through a simple willingness to take on any administrative duties enabling him not to teach, had always spoken of the great virtue of a university as being the context of leisure it provided – for thought, for disinterested study, for afternoon naps. But Coolidge . . . well, Coolidge was reputed not to sleep at all. Late-night travellers crossing the campus saw the lights in his study burning and a hunched figure leaning across the desk and, though some said he employed a man to play the part, the work he did was phenomenal. When there was none, he invented some. His regime had multiplied problems and decisions and the need for dealing with them. In addition to lunch-time conferences, there were weekend study conferences in wooden cabins up in the Rockies, and seven-day conferences in Reno or Denver.

The committee concerned with the new writing fellow convened just before one. When they arrived, one of Coolidge’s many secretaries was setting up the large tape-recorder with which he liked to enshrine all proceedings. ‘Come right in, we’re all set,’ said the girl. ‘And talk good.’ They gathered round the shiny conference table; there were several members of the English Department, with whom the writer was officially connected: there was the present writing fellow, a humble creature in spectacles and string tie; there was Dean French, who never spoke, and Dr Wink from Business Administration, who always raised difficult objections; and there was an assistant professor from Physical Education named Selena May Sugar. They gathered together at the table, spreading out their cartons of milk, their hot-dogs and their chicken salad sandwiches. Some, not familiar with the experience, insisted on gazing through the window with white faces at the students making their way across campus to the delights of the cafeteria.

‘They don’t know how lucky they are,’ said Dr Hamish Wagner of the English Department. ‘Boy, could I just eat a steak in the Faculty Club right now. I just hope to God my belly won’t rumble and get onto that tape.’

‘Take it easy, Hamish,’ said Selena May Sugar. ‘Let’s don’t drive ourselves out of our minds.’

Outside it was a beautiful day, and the sun tinged the snow with red; in it, through it, the students walked, in bright winter clothes, the occasional plaster cast, from a skiing accident, adding a further glow of colour to the scene (decorating plaster casts was a local student folk-art). A small scampering horde of Alsatian dogs worried the frigid, iced trees and were chased in their turn by the uniformed figures of the campus policemen, always poised against anarchy. You could almost hear the spring cascading down the Rockies, stood off there on the horizon. Insects buzzed over the campus and peered in the windows at the committee. ‘It’s beautiful out there,’ said Selena May Sugar. The campanile, an immense phallic object set directly in the middle of the campus and worshipped nightly in its dells, grottoes and parking lots, began to shake as it rang out one o’clock and followed it, as for dessert, with the state song.

As the hour struck, the door opened and President Coolidge came in. He wore a distinctive aftershave lotion which penetrated the whole room; one always knew where he had been. He sat down at the head of the table and called the meeting to order by rapping on the wood with a large Phi Beta Kappa key he carried for this purpose. ‘Okay,’ he said. ‘Well, this meeting is to consider who, whom, I don’t know which, we should appoint to next year’s writing fellowship. Present at the meeing, oh hell, everybody, I guess. Now just a minimal point before we start talking this one out and I hand over to Harris; remember if you don’t speak right there into the mike Rosemary in the stenographic pool ain’t going to hear a single goddam word you say and you’ll be out of the record. Well, okay, I’ll pass the buck right to Harris Bourbon. Hey, where is he?’

‘I think he went over to the student cafeteria to get a chocolate shake,’ said an associate professor in the English Department named Bernard Froelich.

President Coolidge looked petulant: ‘I just want to remind you all that all these meetings are scheduled for me in a very tight schedule and I have to depend on your punctuality,’ he said. Then the door was pushed open and Dr Harris Bourbon, the head of the English Department, stumbled in. The chocolate shake he had just imbibed had left its traces on his grey moustache. He was a big and totally unimpressive man who had been raised locally on a farm and had risen in the academic world through sheer endurance. He always wore, in the snowy American winter, a fantastic headpiece, a kind of Eskimo flying helmet; he took it off slowly now, shaking a flake or two of new snow from the furry earflaps, and set it on the table in front of him, while the tape-recorder recorded this piece of business.

‘Hit’s real cold still,’ said Bourbon, sitting down, and taking some tattered notes from his pocket. ‘Want me to give them the poop?’

‘If you’d do that, Har,’ said Coolidge.

Harris Bourbon gave them the poop, while the rest sat silently round the table. He pointed out that your aim in founding your creative writing fellowship was that of conveying to your student the high ideals and distinctive standards of your creative life. But there was a problem. Writers were not what they used to be. In fact, this was an age in which the literary life was a form of delinquency and all kinds of questions had to be asked about the way writers acted. Bernard Froelich, unwrapping a hamburger from its waxed paper, recalled that Bourbon had not done very well out of the few representations of him that had appeared in the fiction of the creative writing fellows: his unimpressive demeanour and his instinctive conservatism had been pinned down for posterity rather too neatly to please. Another problem, said Bourbon, was that Benedict Arnold was not one of the best known of your American colleges, and . . . ‘That may have been true a few years back, Har, but I wouldn’t like to think that was the situation now,’ said President Coolidge. Bourbon realized he had made a slip and tried to backtrack. The real point, he said, was that it was difficult to find anyone who was sufficiently unsuccessful to take a fellowship so remote from New York, and publishers, and the big TV networks, and yet was good enough. All the leading neglected writers had been snatched up long before by Wellesley and Bennington and Kenyon and Hillesley. The only poets and novelists who were neglected were so goddam bad they had to be, and those who wouldn’t have taken the appointment at any price because they believed that success was the mark of failure, or that to live on campus was a fate worse than death.

‘Well, okay, fine,’ said President Coolidge, when Bourbon’s drawling western voice had stopped, ‘but I thought you painted the picture a little black, Har. I should have thought this country was full of fine young writing men just waiting for an opportunity like the one Benedict Arnold has pledged itself to give them.’

The present writing fellow, clearly depressed to see his sands running out, looked up and said, ‘Why, I’m sure there are a whole lot of writers who’d be very glad to be here.’

‘Well,’ said President Coolidge, ‘this is a man who should know, and I think while he’s here we should just give Mr Turk a little round of applause for the work he’s put in this year.’ Mr Turk bowed his head as the committee clapped him.

‘Waal,’ said Harris Bourbon, stubbornly, when this was over, ‘we already made a whole lot of approaches.’

‘In the circumstances,’ said Dr Wink from Business Administration (‘Take a BA in B.A. from B.A.’ Coolidge had advertised in the business journals), ‘I’d like to propose to this meeting that we abolish the writing fellowship completely and put these funds to another use. I have no complaint against the present fellow, Mr Turk, and I’m pleased to see him here today, but not all his predecessors have been particularly desirable men. In many cases, Mr President, their politics and values have been so undesirable as to be a menace to security. One man used to lie naked on the front lawn of a house he’d rented in a first-class section of town. My wife pointed him out to me several times. It was said that realty prices dropped substantially the whole year he was in that section. And I’m told that the man before him was not heterosexual.’

‘Is this an ethical objection to the fellowship, Dr Wink?’ asked Coolidge from the chair.

‘No, what I’m talking about is the overall failure of this project. Almost none of these writers we’ve had has been an asset to the university.’

‘They wrote about it.’

‘Not very favourably – and most of them never bothered to meet the classes allocated to them. The influence they’ve exerted over the students here doesn’t seem to be exactly the kind of thing we had in mind. One man boasted to me in the Faculty Club that he’d spent three weeks living in a closet in Thrump Hall. We have enough difficulty graduating the occasional virgin without that kind of person around.’

‘Well, that sounds to me like an ethical objection,’ said Coolidge. ‘Not that I’ve any objection to ethical objections, but have you any objection beside the ethical one?’

‘All this seems enough for me, Mr President.’

‘Rosemary, make a note of that ethical objection by Dr Wink, will ya? Yes, right, well, thank you. Any other objections that aren’t ethical?’

Bernard Froelich, who had spent the last few minutes trying to get the noise of his mastication of the hamburger on to the tape, leaned to Selena May Sugar and whispered, ‘Neat.’

‘Ah, Coolidge is all right.’

‘Oh, Bernard, Selena, there’s nothing we have to say at these meetings we don’t want the whole group to hear,’ said Coolidge. ‘We’re trying to think in a group because we know we think best in a group. Can we have that again?’

‘I was asking Selena if she wanted some of my onions,’ said Froelich.

‘I said I had sufficient onions,’ said Selena.

‘Rosemary, forget all that in the transcript,’ said Coolidge. ‘Okay, well, has anyone else here a suggestion he wants to put into space and see if it orbits? Looks like we’re waiting for a breakthrough on this one.’

‘I’d just like to ask Dr Bourbon,’ said Bernard Froelich, ‘whether he thinks that it’s necessary for a writer to be a conformist before we ask him to this campus. Seems to me that could be a very dangerous policy.’

‘Well,’ said Bourbon, ‘I think we’re talking about a real problem here. I mean, it’s right, we want someone who’s goin’ to behave right and git on well with the students and all, carry a portion of the teachin’ load. Hit just ain’t easy.’

‘Perhaps that’s because we’re looking for the wrong kind of person? I should have thought that most of the major writers of our time would miss out on that definition.’

‘I don’t see why we shouldn’t look for a fellar of this kind. We done well for ourselves this year. Hen Turk’s been teachin’ six hours and he’s got one boy written a novel about Madison Avenue that he’s sent off to his own publisher and is expectin’ a favourable report on.’

Froelich looked across at the present incumbent, a depressed, elderly person who wrote novels about the Old West, careful historical novels in which every trace in a set of harness, every knot in a cowboy’s string tie, was there because it had been found in the records. It was well known that he bored his creative writing classes by giving two-hour talks on researching the frontier. He sat across the table, dry and speculative, his Stetson in front of him, his gold-rimmed spectacles shining green in the glare, exactly the kind of person that Froelich hoped never to see again in the fellowship. ‘Well,’ he said, ‘I think that kind of demand is a mistake, but it’s your department, Harris. Still, since we’ve not been successful, maybe there’s something else we can do. I’d like to make a proposal, President Coolidge.’

‘Sure, Bern, yes, lay it on the table.’

‘Well, my thought is, why don’t we approach a foreign writer? This kind of fellowship isn’t very common over in Europe, say, and the students would learn a lot if we got someone from abroad.’

President Coolidge nodded and said, ‘Well, that’s a nice idea, Bern, really. We can look it up, but I think I’m right in ad-libbing that there’s nothing in the statutes that limits this appointment to an American citizen, and, well, as we all know, Europe has produced one hell of a lot of great writers . . .’

‘I don’t see why we can’t find some American boy just starting out in the writing business who’d come to this campus and do what we tell him to,’ said Dr Wink.

‘I thought it had been said that all the genuine possibilities of that kind had been exhausted,’ said Froelich. ‘What I’d say about this is that the Europeans have lived with the arts a good deal longer than we have on this side. They’ve got a style to the literary life over there, and I think it might be a lesson to some of our students on this campus if we did tempt over someone like that.’ President Coolidge nodded approvingly, and Froelich found that he was growing excited. He was a complicated, ambitious person who took rather a different view of the function of the creative writing fellow from his colleagues. He thought these writers proved the superiority of creation over criticism, a thing that English Departments quickly forget about, and every excess they achieved, every shock they gave to Bourbon, provided Froelich with a peculiar pleasure. When they took off their clothes at freshmen mixers and seduced the wives of the faculty members down by the lake on campus, Froelich could do nothing but rejoice; this was the lesson of the wildness of the world in a community that believed in reducing art to simple order.

And Froelich felt indignant for another reason; he discerned a flavour of nervousness and conservatism in the protests that had been brought up at the meeting, and his liberal hackles were rising. Froelich, educated in the east, was perpetually amazed by the note of caution that kept being sounded in this pioneer section of the west. And also, because he was from the east, the word ‘Europe’ sounded sweetly on his tongue; he liked to repeat it among people who had dismissed that place long ago, or thought it had been abolished. So, looking round the room, shining white from the reflected snow, he went on to point out how successful European writers had always been when they had visited the campus to lecture. He recalled some of the speakers who in recent years had stirred the campus to excitement – Auden, Simone de Beauvoir, Dylan Thomas. At the mention of the last name Bourbon visibly shuddered, and Froelich, who was not only a partisan but a politician, realized he might have been running ahead rather too fast. Not all the campus had been ready for Thomas yet, and some had been too ready; he had come and gone, leaving the place in a state of disorder, a state, indeed, of oestrus.

‘He was a very interestin’ man, but I don’t think he’d fit in for a whole year, Bernard,’ said Bourbon.

‘I thought he was dead now,’ said Selena May Sugar.

‘That’s right,’ said Froelich. ‘No, I was just using him as an example. But if someone like that seems too far out, well, there’s no race like the English for producing respectable writers.’

‘Well, yes, Bern, that’s right,’ said President Coolidge. ‘There are other European writers. I’ve met quite a number of them myself, I might say, and mighty nice polite people a lot of them were, too. A lot of people think of Europeans as immoral, but I found a lot of them over there were as moral as you or I. What do you say on this one, Har?’

Bourbon was obviously very doubtful; Froelich, who knew all the flaws and uncertainties in his department head, and had long ago learned the art of exploiting them, knew he would be. But he always gave in to the sense of a meeting, lacking any positive principles of his own, and Froelich knew that his cause was as good as won. This gave him considerable pleasure, because he always liked winning causes, but also because he had further ends in view. His efforts were not over yet, and he poised himself for the second part of his campaign.

‘Waal,’ said Bourbon, ‘if there ain’t no limitations in the terms of the fellowship . . .’

‘No, we’re quite free on this one, Har, I just looked it up, we can play it by ear,’ said President Coolidge.

‘. . . Waal then, darn it, I think I’m in favour. We’re takin’ the hell of a chance, but why not? One thing I’d like to say right now, though. I think we oughta try to find an Englishman, and I’ll give you my reasons for that. A Frenchman or a German or someone of that kind would be nice, and I don’t want to sound prejudiced, but if we picked someone from those areas there’s a grave risk the freshmen wouldn’t understand ’em.’

Froelich saw that Bourbon’s manner had brightened, and he realized why. Surely, Bourbon was thinking, surely in England, if anywhere, the old gentlemanly idea of the man of letters still reigned. A Gosse, a Saintsbury, even a Forster, seemed to him the kind of thing that Benedict Arnold needed most, a man of culture, a stabilizing influence. Froelich, who felt he had fed the crumbs of these thoughts to Bourbon’s imagination, knew intimately what kind of pleasure he was getting. Coolidge asked for some suggested names, and Froelich, looking around at the sense of the meeting, played his next card. He proposed the name of James Walker.

It was a name that rang no bells. Harris Bourbon, a farmer but a gentleman, read nothing after 1895, and regarded Jude the Obscure as the ultimate in literary daring. He had said as much in his book The Bucket of Tragedy (1947), in which his concern with the Jacobean dramatists, who now occupied all his time, provoked him into condemning all literature not formally tragic in structure. Dr Hamish Wagner, another representative of the English Department, was an Auden expert who had recently taken charge of the day-to-day direction of the Freshman Composition programme. This had happened in 1955, and since that year his reading, apart from Auden, had stopped completely. All he thought about now was the Unattached or Dangling Modifier, the Gross Illiteracy, and Manuscript Mechanics, the basic principles of Comp . . . His red moustache shone bright in the snow-glare; he wanted to say something, to express approval or disapproval, but nothing came to mind, for he was irrevocably out of touch, an academic casualty. Dean French, a big urbane man, said he approved of the principle; Dr Wink said he didn’t. Selina May Sugar, who was interested in anger, seemed to recognize the name when it was put. President Coolidge nodded sagely at it.

‘This,’ said Froelich, ‘is the James Walker who wrote The Last of the Old Lords. He’s a youngish man, very promising. There was a story on him in Time magazine about two months back . . .’ Froelich did not know Walker, and he had picked the name fairly casually. But though he didn’t know him, he liked his general context and spirit. His name had appeared in literary magazines and little reviews in connection with Amis’s, Wain’s, Murdoch’s. At the same time he was thought rather more provincial; he was a regional man, a man who wrote about sensitives who live away from the places where things happen. In the new version of this familiar kind of English novel, the heroes are demoted half a class, rebellion is increased proportionately, significance ensues. But Walker did it all very vigorously; he had a stylish way of exposing just that very gentlemanliness and culture that Bourbon admired which made him, here and now, of special interest to Froelich. Froelich wanted a rebel, but he wanted an interesting one. Like so many Americans, Froelich was a devout democrat who was charmed by the English class system. And Walker, he had sensed, was a man who was in much the same position – a man poised between an old order and a new one, looking forward, looking back, hung between revolution and restoration. At any rate, he was likely enough to cause confusion and to take to him, Bernard Froelich. So Froelich went on to stress the advantages of his proposal, tuning his words to Coolidge, and Bourbon, and the whole committee. Walker was sufficiently well known to be meaningful to the right people, but not sufficiently well known to be cavalier. There were honours being done on both sides, and Benedict Arnold could restrain him if he proved very difficult.

‘Would he come out here to this savagery?’ asked Dean French, straightening his already neat necktie.

‘I think he would,’ said Froelich. ‘We’re offering him a real chance. That’s why it’s so neat.’

‘Look, Bern, just brief me some more about this man,’ said Coolidge.

Bourbon intervened to ask if he were ‘considerable enough’.

‘Well,’ said Froelich, ‘let’s put it this way. He’s not a book, but he’s a chapter.’ The remark came to mind because this, to Froelich, was exactly what James Walker was. Froelich was writing a book; it was on Plight, Twentieth-century Plight, with special reference to Post-war Plight. It was a long and wide-ranging book (there is plenty of plight in the twentieth century) and Froelich was covering all there was to cover – Alienation, the Existential Dilemma, Rebellion and Angst, in their American and their English manifestations. It was a book that was important to Froelich because his chances of promotion lay in it. And of the many long chapters one of them, entitled ‘Anomie Versus Bonhomie in Contemporary British Fiction’, was to be largely concerned with the novels – so splendidly typical, so socially representative, so aptly full of The Liberal Dilemma, Loss of Self, and Us Versus Them – of James Walker. This was yet another reason for wanting the man; he could feed his life into Froelich’s book, he could be kept perpetually under observation. The pattern seemed so neat – Walker’s liberalism, his Englishness, and his very existence, ready for the observant biographer – that Froelich grew quite excited. ‘He stands for something,’ said he. ‘The new English writing at its best. Form and matter. Style and content. I’m sure we’d all learn a lot. He’s neither proletarian nor dilettante. He’s riding all the contemporary storms. He’s, well, I’d say he’s a snip.’

‘For forty-nine cents he’s a steal,’ said Selena May Sugar, ‘so okay, let’s steal him.’

Dr Wink protested vigorously, but the tape-recorder flapped at the end of the reel and President Coolidge, already thinking about a meeting with the Alumni Friends of Football Committee, said, ‘Well, fine, Bern, let’s say we’ll try him. Will you get his address and write me out some kind of letter, Har, and I’ll sign it?’

Froelich sat back with a sense of pleasure and achievement. A few alternative names were suggested and then President Coolidge brought the meeting to a close. Froelich left the room with a strange, intuitive feeling that he knew that Walker would come, that the next year would be a good one, that his own future, and his own plans for the liberalization of the campus, were already set well into motion. A mental picture of the fiery English genius, so different from Henry Turk, filled his mind. ‘You’re so smart,’ he said to himself.

The committee meeting was held in late March, when the snowploughs were still scraping up a late new fall from the campus paths and the cracking of ice on the streams presaged the sudden outburst of spring. Two days later, President Coolidge, pausing on his way to a ten-dollar-a-plate banquet of the Faculty Wives for Chopin, signed the letter Harris Bourbon had drafted, and soon winged messengers sped it across the Atlantic to England and James Walker, for whom the year was turning, too.