ON THE FIRST DAY of the new semester, Walker woke in his bed at the Bourbon house to hear a strange hum and buzz in the air. The bright American day shone in through the thin gauzy drapes, and balmy winds blew in from the direction of Party the sound of yells, and screams, and shouts. Closer at hand, on the gravel outside, someone was walking; the steps ceased and suddenly a clear ‘Goddarn it’ was superimposed on the distant noise. It was Dr Bourbon, taking another look at the place where Froelich, in his wildness, had torn the fender off his car. Walker got out of bed and dressed quickly. When he got into the kitchen Dr Bourbon was already there, slipping his apron from the hook.
‘Hear that? All that noise?’ he said, nodding his head in the direction of town. ‘The kids are all back.’
‘Is that what the racket is?’ asked Walker, feeling suddenly like an old resident.
‘Yup,’ said Bourbon, tying the apron, ‘they’re all registerin’ for their courses.’
Walker sat down and Bourbon cracked two eggs into a copper pan. ‘So it’s all starting,’ said Walker. ‘Yup,’ said Bourbon. ‘Oh, take a look in the Bugle. I put it there. Nice little story about you, son.’
Walker picked up the newspaper, folded to reveal an item headed ‘Angry Young Man Loses Anger in Party.’ It began: ‘Angry young man author James Walker, visiting Party from England to head Benedict Arnold’s creative writing program, announced Wednesday that he had stopped feeling angry since he arrived in town. “In Party there’s nothing to feel angry about,” chunky, tweed-clad Walker told a Bugle reporter . . .’
Walker put the paper down, positively red with anger. ‘I didn’t say that,’ he said.
‘Nice piece,’ said Bourbon.
‘I think it’s terrible. I shall have to go down to the newspaper office and ask them to retract it.’
‘Oh, I wouldn’t do that, Mis’ Walker,’ said Bourbon, surprised. ‘You know how it is, they write these things up a mite.’
‘It’s nothing like what I said,’ said Walker.
‘Seems close to the gist of it to me,’ said Bourbon. ‘Seems to me you’re just regrettin’ you said it.’
‘I didn’t say that, did I?’ asked Walker.
‘Well, sumpn like it. Any case, I wouldn’t go down there, don’t want to get off on the wrong foot with the press.’
‘I seem to be very good at getting off on the wrong foot,’ said Walker.
Dr Bourbon, who had been subdued ever since he had sat up all night waiting for Walker to return from his visit to the Froelichs’, didn’t seem disposed to refute this. The Bourbons had been nice to him, the matter had never been mentioned. The day before, Mrs Bourbon had taken him downtown and shown him the stores he might want to know about – the best men’s store; the Doozy Duds, a coin-operated laundry; the Rexall Druggist; and the First National Bank, where an amiable western character in a string tie and stuck-on mutton-chop whiskers had opened his account and given him a chequebook with his name on it, a wallet for his statements, and a piggy-bank inscribed JAMES’S BANK. At the supermarket, for supermarket orientation, she had taken him in through the self-opening doors and he had been introduced to a black-and-white check elephant and been given a free balloon and a genuine china cup and saucer. Even so, Walker felt that the fine glow of relationship was dimming out, that the pleasures of hosting were losing their savour, that the best thing a guest could do was, after all, go. So the previous afternoon he had visited, at the Froelichs’ suggestion, the International House on campus and been shown a room with a small desk with a snaky-coiled lamp, a closet full of wire hangers, and two bunkbeds. ‘By the way,’ he now said to Bourbon, ‘I’ve fixed my living arrangements. I’m moving into a room in International House.’
‘Waal, I’m told it’s a mighty comfortable little place. Course they’re mostly foreigners there, but you won’t mind that. Indians and Japs and all. Did you take a look at the room?’
‘Yes. It’s a double, but they’re letting me have it as a single. I shall have plenty of space and a place to work, you know.’
‘Yeah, well, I guess that’s the best. Waal, it’s been mighty nice havin’ you here, Mis’ Walker. When do you plan to move?’
‘Is today all right?’
‘Oh, when you like, boy. We ain’t wantin’ to use the guest room for a few more days yet.’
‘Well, thank you,’ said Walker ‘and for all your kindness and hospitality.’
‘Fun for us, Mis’ Walker,’ said Bourbon. ‘Sweetie, Mis’ Walker’s leavin’ today, movin’ into International House,’ he shouted through to the conversation pit. Mrs Bourbon came through, her cat on her shoulder.
‘Oh, that’s nice,’ she said. ‘They have English tea on Sunday afternoon once a month. I always go. They make it with those, what do you call them? – leaves. Not the bags.’ Walker said his thanks and shook hands. Then he went into his bedroom and packed up the cases; Dr Bourbon was taking him down on his way to the university. The last thing he heard was a shout of ‘Goodbye, turd’ from Alphonse in the pool; the last thing he saw was the hostile face of Crispin, lowering from some bushes close to the drive. And then he left.
Bourbon dropped him at International House, a big, white-painted house with colonial pillars, on the edge of the campus, where town met gown and hated one another. An Arab student led him up to his room. ‘Remember, please, this is a democratic place,’ he said. Walker unpacked his cases again and put his papers and underwear in the drawers.
The phone on the wall rang. ‘Su,’ said a high little voice.
‘Pardon?’ said Walker.
‘This is Mr Su. Welcome to International House. I am head of Foreign Students Committee. Good to know you.’
‘And you,’ said Walker.
‘Remember, call Su when you’re in trouble here. Any information or aid. I will invite you to all meetings. They are very democratic.’
‘Thank you, Mr Su,’ said Walker. After he had put down the phone, Walker picked it up again on a whimsy, for it was the first time he had had free access to this means of communication, and called Patrice Froelich in the admissions office.
‘Hi hi,’ he said, ‘it’s James Walker.’
‘Hi, how are you?’
‘Just to tell you I’ve moved into International House.’
‘Fine, how is it?’
‘Very democratic,’ said Walker.
‘Let me write down your number,’ said Patrice.
Walker gave it and Patrice said, ‘Now you can do what you like.’
‘Fine, well, I’ll call you again, then. I like that.’
‘Well, do that,’ said Patrice. ‘Good to hear you, James.’
Walker put down the phone and heard the carillon, nearer now, playing ‘It Ain’t What You Do It’s The Way That You Do It’. It was now his ambition to find his way to the English Department and sit in his office and prepare for his first class, tomorrow. He picked up his map and the pile of papers marked Faculty Orientation and set out. On the way out of the house, he looked in on the bathrooms. There were no doors on the lavatories; a row of olive-skinned Asiatics sat contemplatively, their trousers down, on the pots in each stall. Very democratic, thought Walker.
Outside, the students had taken over Party. College boys drove by in cars with their feet out of the windows. On the sloping roofs of the student apartments and the sororities, co-eds in simple bikinis sunned their brown skins and threw peanuts at people passing by. It made Walker want to wait there to catch one when she fell off. On campus, the girls walked along the campus paths, their notebooks in their arms, wearing neat Bermuda shorts or tight skirts, with darts under the rump to make their bottoms stick out. Despite his map, it took Walker some time to find the English Department’s wooden hut; at one point he crossed a stream and found himself plodding through bushes, up to his ankles in mud. Finally the hut appeared before him, vibrating with activity. Inside, students in large numbers walked up and down the corridors, making the floors bounce, and worked the Coke machine. In his office his colleagues were already sitting at their desks, giving student conferences; boys and girls sat beside them, spreading their knees, chewing gum, arguing about their destinies. A co-ed, a sorority pin at the tip of her left nipple, was saying to Froelich, over in his corner: ‘Hi there, Mr Froelich. Are you going to want me to think, like my last teacher did?’
‘Hi hi, James,’ said Froelich. ‘The peons are here.’
‘Good morning,’ said Walker.
‘Want to use your desk?’ asked Froelich. ‘I left some teaching notes in the drawers.’ He pulled out the drawers and tipped them upside-down on the desktop; papers, old cigarette packs, books of matches and a Coca-Cola bottle tumbled about. ‘The guy who had this desk last year drove off the top of a mountain halfway through the second semester,’ said Froelich. ‘You’ve got to be tough to survive.’
Walker sat down and opened up the instructions for his first class, trying not to think about his predecessor. The instructions said: ‘Meeting One. Introduce yourself and spell your name; also write it on blackboard. Check the names of the students. Make sure no students are in your section who have been assigned to other sections . . .’ It went on, but the print blurred in Walker’s eyes and he found that he was feeling very frightened indeed. Across the room he heard Froelich’s voice rise: ‘Of course what I tell you is right, because if it was wrong I wouldn’t tell you it. Okay, my colleagues might disagree with me, but they’re wrong. Have confidence.’
But confidence was what Walker had not. America was a society where the words right and wrong were, from his point of view, inapplicable. Anybody could do anything. And amid this chaos stood up a few pedantries of grammar. The truth, tablets of revelation! ‘It should always be made clear who is addressing whom, and on the subject of whom.’ Walker made some notes for the class, despairing, and a moment later Froelich came over and proposed that they go to the faculty lounge for coffee. The lounge was full of teachers, none of them lounging, all of them tense. They were mostly young men who had just come in, pulling Hertz trailers from New York and Wisconsin and Santa Barbara. They had supposed they were individuals, intellectually unique, and now here were hundreds more like themselves. They stood in the lounge and looked at one another in desperate enquiry, seeing their intellects, their critical responsiveness, their high literary awareness, their special quality of mind, multiplied by scores. In the corner of the lounge an old man tended a coffee machine; they paid five cents each and filled their cups. ‘See that man behind the machine?’ said Froelich. ‘He’s an emeritus professor. He watches the coffee and then he goes downtown to get the latest word on the used-car prices. Can’t bear to give the old place up.’ They sat down, and Froelich said, ‘You look unhappy.’
‘Well,’ said Walker, ‘I am. Here we are in America. A pluralistic society where nothing is not allowed. Everybody goes his own way. But we have to teach them grammar. What do you say on its behalf? “Grammar is what you feel good after. And our sermon today is on the rewards of the good grammatical life. Live grammatically, and all shall be open to you. Your employer will appreciate the clarity of your memoranda, or other kinds of report required in business.” ’
‘Oh, don’t worry about it,’ said Froelich, ‘wait until later in the year. You’ll feel a really fulfilled person when you call up one of your students on the telephone, to ask her for a date or something, and she answers: “This is she speaking.” That’s the day when it all comes right.’
‘But is that teaching? Is that the right relationship between mentor and . . .?’
‘Mented?’ asked Froelich.
‘Go out into the world and do what you will, so long as you use collective nouns correctly, is that what we say?’ asked Walker.
‘What else?’
‘Remember there used once to be a thing called morals? Does that come into it at all?’
‘Now morals,’ said Froelich, ‘well, there, you must wait and see.’
‘I know I shouldn’t pine like this,’ said Walker. ‘After all, this is such a challenge, a wide-open country. Responsibility or non-responsibility – you can choose. It’s a moral supermarket. The trouble is I get so confused, I decide to buy nothing at all.’
‘You need consumer advice,’ said Froelich. ‘And that’s what I’m here for.’
‘I’ll remember,’ said Walker.
‘We’ll have you making the right choices even if we have to make them for you. Well, I’ve got another bunch of peons coming in. You’ll find the office is a real social centre.’
They went out of the faculty lounge and into the English Office, where one of the secretaries looked up at them and smiled. ‘Hi, baby,’ said Froelich, ‘what’s a crummy girl like you doing working in a beautiful joint like this?’
‘I don’t think that’s very funny, Dr Froelich,’ said the girl.
‘Oh,’ said Froelich, ‘I’m looking for a parcel. I’m expecting the proofs of my Plight book.’
‘No parcel here,’ said the secretary. The connecting door to Bourbon’s office opened, and Bourbon put his head out.
‘Oh, Bernard, could you come in a moment? Want to ask you ’bout a little matter . . .’
‘Can it wait, Harris? I’ve got about fifteen kids out there waiting for conferences. Just came in to pick up some proofs.’
‘Oh, well,’ said Bourbon resignedly, ‘later, maybe. Glad to know you’re publishin’, boy. Only way to get on in this academic rat-race.’
‘That’s right, Harris,’ said Froelich, hurrying out of the door.
Walker, standing in front of the letter pigeonholes, found his name at last. There were four letters. One, from Elaine, had been posted before the telegram. It reminded him about his underpants, and said it had rained in Nottingham, and told how the librarian downstairs had come up twice to unstop the sink in the kitchen. ‘I do wish these nine months would hurry up and go away, because I miss you,’ the letter ended. The second, from New York, contained a file card. On it, in rather unformed handwriting, was inscribed a quotation: ‘Fools and young men prate about everything being possible for a man. That, however, is a great error. Spiritually speaking, everything is possible, but in the world of the finite there is much which is not possible. This impossible, however, the knight makes possible by expressing it spiritually, but he expresses it spiritually by waiving his claim to it. The wish which would carry him out into reality, but was wrecked upon the impossibility, is now bent inward, but it is not therefore lost, neither is it forgotten. Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling.’ Underneath was written: ‘I was sorry we missed in NY. So – come again. On the wall of the women’s john at a bar in the Village: If you love life, despicable is thy name. How’s the co-ordination? Julie.’ The third letter, from St Louis, said, ‘Isn’t it a funny country? I’m loving it though. And one has so much money. Are you going to travel? I am, and don’t be at all surprised to see me descend on you. I can offer, if you come to St Louis, a bed-settee in the living room, all quite respectable. You’re a nice boy, and I remember you well. Remember me. Love, Fern Marrow.’ The fourth letter said, ‘Dear Friend: I am giving on the evening of next Thursday, at 7 p.m. (19:00), a small dinner party, and at this party you are the guest of honour. Since you will be the only guest, you will not, I think, be able to plead excuses of “previous engagements”. The proceeding for arrival here is so: take westwards the crosstown bus on Main and request to descend at Mountview. Here is a fire-hydrant. From here walk north on Mountview one block. You cannot fail to observe this house. It is really the house in which the elves make those toys for Santa Claus. There is a bell on the doorpost and against it my name. F. Jochum.’ Walker read all the letters blandly, and felt free of all their claims. He put them in his pocket and went to finish the preparation of his class.
On the day after, the teaching programme began. The wooden hut occupied by the English Department was next to one of the main paths that led across the campus, so that from their offices the members of the faculty could see the co-eds flouncing past the windows, notebooks in their arms, on their way from class to class. On fine days they wore neat blouses and skirts, tight at the rump, or else cut-off jeans with the Greek letters of their sororities painted in white across their behinds; on wet ones they wore slickers in red and blue and yellow or, if it was cold, quilted or fur-lined jackets with hoods. The men wore denims and shirts, or sweaters with the university crest across the bosom. They were a bright sight, and Walker spent a good deal of time peering through the fly-screens on his windows at this campus display. It took place every hour, when the bell rang, the floors boomed, and classes emptied out. The faculty dashed in and out of their offices, taking off and putting on their jackets, servicing the many needs of the students. You could see them as you walked down the corridors, teaching affably, the door open, their voices genial from the podium. The teaching associates, who taught only the composition classes and were usually working for graduate degrees as well, were packed six or eight to an office and could be seen there, with the doors again open, marking themes, preparing classes, writing novels, smoking and occasionally eating lunch. All these people were mentors for Walker in the conduct of his academic life, these men of abstract ideas who read Shakespeare in the morning and played with a football on the grass in the afternoon. It seemed hard to know where they got their inspiration from, why they went on being wise men at all, and it was only from a kind of intellectual optimism that Walker sensed in the American air, a fondness for discovery and growth, that he could relate all the varied parts of them together. They were neither convincingly intellectual nor convincingly philistine; they mixed the materialist and the aesthetic approaches; they were coarse where they might be sensitive and sensitive where they might be coarse.
From his own classes, Walker began to learn. He suspected that he ran them rather differently from the other teachers; for instance, he was always careful to shut the door. He taught, too, in an atmosphere of amiable mystery, unsure about his standards, unsure about his function, unsure even whether his words were being understood or not. The composition class was his most difficult one. It met twice a week in the Chemistry Building, opulent new premises which lay about a half a mile away from the English Department, and involved him in a long walk on which he occasionally got lost completely. The classes were held in a large amphitheatre with a sink and some gas-taps on the teacher’s desk. When he leaned forward excitedly he fell forward into the sink, and on occasions when he grew abstract he was apt to play with the gas-taps and turn them on. The class consisted largely of beautiful girls, all about eighteen, splendidly made up; they sat in the front rows, close to him, exposing beautiful legs, and distracting him with intense perfumes. The men sat separately, on the other side of the aisle, occasionally throwing pieces of paper at the girls. One of them, a big bulky youth with fair hair in a crew-cut, put his feet up on Walker’s desk. All of them appeared to write down everything he said. On the first day he had told them his name – they wrote that down – and had written on the blackboard the number of his office in the English Department. ‘Where is the English Department?’ asked one of the girls, all of whom had started to knit. It was impossible for Walker to answer this and he had to turn for help to others in the class. Presently another girl asked him where he was from, and a boy had asked about the supposed stodginess of English women, and Walker found himself talking about his wife and his sexual habits before marriage and the way in which his parents had brought him up. It had gone on this way ever since. The class seemed to like him, and he liked them. Often he suspected that they only understood a few words of what he was saying, because of his accent, but they were extremely jolly with him and told him a great deal about the dating system. One of the girls offered to knit him a sweater; he felt that, there, he was well on the way to acceptance.
The creative writing classes were simpler but not less challenging. They met in the seminar rooms in the English Building in an atmosphere of pleasant informality. The class members sat round the oblong table, smoking, and reading things they had written, or asking questions about submitting manuscripts and whether they should send self-addressed envelopes or not. The graduate class was the more demanding, because it lasted for two hours and because many of the students were his fellow teachers in the composition course. They were also intense and bright. There were extravagant Emersonians in white socks who wished to recreate in fiction all of human history and human knowledge; there were strange Southern girls who said little but occasionally sketched out plots for stories about extravagant rapes on poor white smallholdings; there was Miss Handlin, the girl whom Walker had met on his first day in Party, who was keeping a visionary spiritual diary about the way she was trying to attain progression through hallucination. The practical, finite pitch of Walker’s thoughts embarrassed him as he discovered that his students were all romantics; they tapped their cigarettes on the old tins used as ashtrays in the seminar room and asked, ‘Well, Mr Walker, what is truth?’ or ‘What does it feel like to die?’ or ‘Where are we going, in this world of ours?’
‘You’re a writer, Mr Walker, so you have to tell us the truth that nobody else tells us,’ Miss Handlin said in the first class. Walker wriggled and went red. ‘You must have a vision of the world; tell us what it is,’ she went on. Walker groped to find it and got nowhere. The classes went on and he began to doubt. Was he a writer at all? Wasn’t he a half-writer, a man who had chanced into this as he might have gone into any profession, a man without dedication or intensity? Had he ever given anything to the imagination? Did he take chances, believe in it as a force? Where and how did literature flow into him, and in what way did it seed or grow? The class pushed him and pressed him and groped with him, and watched to see his spirit stir. He was on the way, though, and he knew it. The provinces, and domesticity, and the home he had left behind, had all lost their grip on him. At night he sat in his room and watched the mountains, while oriental students played ritual basketball in their shorts below his window, and tried to grasp at infinities, at the unethical and irrational immensities that would give him the vastness of spirit he craved. America seemed, through these students, the world of freedom and aspiration he had hoped for it to be. Miss Handlin’s diary, headed with a phrase of Santayana, ‘The imagination, therefore, must furnish to religion and to metaphysics those large ideas tinctured with passion, those supersensible forms shrouded in awe, in which alone a mind of great sweep and vitality can find its congenial objects,’ set the pace of the class. She read from it her visions, achieved through the stimulus of drugs, occasional fornication, and contemplation of nature, keeping the class active in interpretation and Walker alive in his hope that romanticism was not, then, exhausted.
Amid the finite and the diurnal, Walker and his kindred souls wrestled onward, for two hours a week. There was a gay antinomianism about the graduate students, too, and he spent long evenings with them in their rooms in the Graduate Halls, listening to records of Lotte Lenya, eating pretzels, then driving up to parties in the canyon, where the air was sulphurated with sexuality and everyone drank Californian wine. On Friday nights, when the students swarmed out to drive-ins and bars to celebrate date night, they drove around town looking for people giving parties, calling on the married graduates and the younger faculty people to find out what was swinging. It was a world of intellectual vagabonds, sleepers on other people’s couches, and Walker developed a taste for and a loyalty to it all. The graduate students and younger faculty members, who had all spent long years in college, also had an intellectual style Walker envied. They had vast terminologies for talking about literature, and freely used words Walker had never before heard in anyone’s speech vocabulary – mimesis, epistemology, mythopoeic. They had strong specialisms which they talked about in detail – a strong Shelley group banded together in the faculty lounge to talk about Epipsychidion over cups of Maxwell House – and Walker was struck by their real concern with ideas. Walker got on with all these well, and his only difficult encounters were with Hamish Wagner, who always prefaced any conversation with him with the phrase ‘Pip pip, old boy’ and saw him as a stage Englishman, and some of the older faculty members who had spent time in Europe and for whom he had a glow; they were vastly disappointed when he set aside his tweeds on purchasing a seersucker suit in blue and white stripe that made him look like a sunshade. People regularly came into his office, where he sat giving student consultations and marking papers, to talk to him. It was a good world for growing in.
One evening, at the end of the second week of the semester, Dr Bourbon invited all the faculty and graduate students to his house, in order to introduce them to one another. There were two hundred of them, and they drove out in packed cars to the ranch house. In the doorway Bourbon and Hamish Wagner, Head of Composition, stood, pinning tags on lapels, giving the wearer’s name, degrees, and a short list of his publications. Inside, the house where Walker had stayed was transformed. The two hundred filled it; people swayed back and forth in eddies. A Spenser specialist stood outside on the patio to prevent people falling into the swimming pool, and a Swinburne man was stationed by the barbecue pit to stop people from skewering themselves on the spit. The realization that their colleagues were so many in number brought a return of the depression that everyone had felt on the first day; people went about, one eye low down, reading the tags on lapels. Some of the women looked rather red. Walker got himself a drink and hid in one corner of the room, talking to Cindy Handlin. ‘I’ve just been reading The Magic Mountain,’ said Miss Handlin.
‘Ah, yes,’ said Walker, ‘a splendid book.’
‘Isn’t it good? Isn’t it?’ said Miss Handlin. ‘Didn’t it just give you an orgasm?’
‘Well, it didn’t actually,’ said Walker, ‘but I’ll look at it again.’
‘Oh, do,’ said Miss Handlin.
Across the room, Hamish Wagner asked for silence and said that Dr Bourbon was going to speak. The crowd all sat down tailor-fashion on the floor, and Bourbon appeared in the serving hatch, a curiously effective podium. His head and shoulders stuck through, his moustache catching the light. He smiled and said, ‘First of all I just want to say “Howdy” to everybody, ole friends and new ones.’ A few people said ‘Howdy’ back at him. ‘Folks,’ he went on, ‘in these times a lot of people don’t realize how important English is. Now we know that, that’s why we’re all here, teachin’ and all, but we’ve got to convince these kids of the importance of English. I want you to think that after a year these kids will go away and say, “Boy, that was a great teacher I had there in Comp., or World Lit. Maybe I’ll take some courses in Lit. next year.” Teach ’em right, and these kids will come back for more.’ Bourbon then went on to define some of the fundamental axioms of teaching as he saw it: avoid intellectual arrogance, never criticize another teacher to a student, don’t smoke in the corridors of wooden buildings. Gifts of money should not be accepted in exchange for favours. Teachers should not light out for the West Coast on a two-week razzle without arranging for someone to meet their classes. If teachers were attacked by a member, or members, of their class, they should report it to the Dean of Studies, even if they were not wounded. ‘Now,’ he went on, ‘I want you all to introduce yourselves to one another. I’d like us to get up in alphabetical order and announce our names, our degrees, and our list of publications.’ People began to stand up and testify, as Bourbon read out their names. When he got round to Walker he rose sheepishly and mentioned his degree. ‘A special welcome to Mis’ Walker from England,’ said Mrs Bourbon. ‘He’s our creative writin’ fellow and he’s published some fine novels. Tell them the names of your novels, Mis’ Walker, so they can go right out and order them.’ Walker gave the titles of his novels and was rewarded with a small round of applause.
Afterwards Walker took his drink out into the patio and stood in the darkness looking out over the lights of Party, shining through the trees. It was neat and small and comforting, and after the ceremonial of acceptance Walker felt himself a citizen, an approved man of mind, a spoke in the cycle of learning. He was of this élite, and it had accepted him. An accredited teacher, he felt his loyalties growing to include these visionary souls. They were of one body; materialists of grammar, but on the path to higher things. Then he heard someone in the darkness behind him, blundering through a bush, and Dr Bourbon appeared by his side.
‘Shoot,’ he said, wiping his brow. ‘Have to git a bigger house, if the department keeps on expandin’.’
‘It’s an enormous party,’ said Walker.
‘Yip,’ said Bourbon, ‘they’ve drunk all my supplies. Had to send Crispin out for some more ice. Well, must git back in there, but I just wanted to tell you somethin’. I wrote a memorandum to the President ’bout the loyalty oath business. Got a reply today. Said all members of staff had to sign it, accordin’ to state law. But he says if the British government did require you to overthrow the American government you’d be covered under international law. He looked it up.’
‘Well, thank you very much,’ said Walker, ‘I’ll have to think about it again. It seems an equivocal position.’
‘Waal,’ said Bourbon, ‘I guess Britain and the States are goin’ to see pretty much eye to eye for the rest of the academic year. Might as well sign.’
‘I’ll see,’ said Walker.
They walked back inside. Elderly faculty wives were making gracious rounds among the graduate students, and a fairly rigid class system was operating. The graduates all seemed rather subdued by the formalities of the occasion, but there was considerable delight when Hamish Wagner, pouring a bagful of ice into the punchbowl, got into difficulties – the ice exploded upward in a high pillar of smoke, scattering a fine spray over the people nearby.
‘Mighty violent ice, that,’ said Bourbon, waving ineffectually at the smoke cloud.
‘I got dry ice,’ said Crispin, leaning against the wall and cackling with laughter, ‘the kind they use for starting rainstorms.’ Harris Bourbon shook his head sadly and the graduate students poked one another and hid suppressed mirth. Miss Handlin took it rather differently, however.
‘Oh, wasn’t that ecstatic?’ she said to Walker. ‘Did you ever see anything so beautiful? I guess that’s one of the most beautiful things I ever saw. Doesn’t it make you want to take your clothes off?’
‘It certainly does,’ said Walker politely.
On the next evening Walker took the crosstown bus, found out where to deposit his fare, and sat on the bench, watching Party unroll through the windows, until the driver said, ‘Here’s where you want out.’ Dr Jochum lived in a part of town that Walker had never visited and never really knew about; it was composed of extravagant Gothic houses in wood, and was a relic of the rich mining days when Party felt confident about itself. The houses were in small glades of trees and had big lawns; they were entered deviously, through paths and fences and over grass sections. The house where Jochum roomed was distinguished by onion domes on the roof, so that it looked like a smaller version of the Kremlin, and by doors at all levels, with steps up to them and steps down to them. Walker found the right door, then the right bell. Jochum appeared instantaneously, beaming, wearing shorts, a gay shirt, and moccasin shoes. ‘A big welcome here,’ he said. ‘Now we must go carefully up these stairs.’ He led the way up a tortured, big-banistered staircase to a tiny room in the roof; it had wooden walls, a high bed in the centre, and at one end, in a gable window, two chairs and a maple table. ‘Please take off your jacket, I vill hang it carefully in the closet, and then sit down,’ said Jochum. ‘Then I vill serve you first some tea. It was with tea that we first met each other, do you recall?’
‘Yes, I do,’ said Walker.
‘One moment,’ said Jochum, ‘I vill be back. In the meantime here is a newspaper to read.’
But before Walker had even unfolded the Bugle Jochum was back with a tray. ‘Vell,’ he said, ‘has the desert worked? Have you found the lost character?’
‘I think I’m finding it.’
‘How does it look?’
‘Oh, pretty bad.’
‘Vell, that at least is interesting. Most people find they haven’t got any at all. Please eat while we are talking.’
‘Thank you.’
‘See, I am eating too. Of course, character is not a fashionable concept. Now we think that we act because our family situation was so, because our historical location is so, because we are sailing with the tide of history, or because it has abandoned us as reactionary deviants. Today all our actions are really performed by our grandfathers; we take no responsibility, like the owners of umbrella stands in hotels. So, you see, nobody believes really in people any more. People, vell, they are a nineteenth-century concept. Now man is a focus of forces.’
‘Well, I feel that’s true,’ said Walker. ‘I haven’t succeeded in finding much self yet . . . as you warned me I wouldn’t.’
‘Ah vell, what do you expect? The good ship you sail in is called Eclectica; you are blown about by the winds as they come. You have no idea how to conduct yourself, so you make a virtue of whim. That is quite natural.’
‘Yes,’ said Walker, eating a large sandwich filled with tuna-fish. ‘But that can be a nice mode of being.’
‘Oh yes, but such an atomized one. The Marxists always tell that the nineteenth century was the age of atomized behaviour. Individualism. As I am telling my classes always, it was not so. Those were the great days of being the grand carnival of existence. And why? Because everyone had a large piece of society in his head when he was six months old, and a vast ethical system when he was adult. That is why there was Freud; everyone thinks that Freud knew about insides and Marx about society, but it was the good Sigmund that knew about society. It starts here, in the head.’ Jochum rapped hard with his fist on his skull.
‘Under the pressure of the facts,’ said Walker. ‘I mean, look how the world is going. Look at this vast urbanized and technologized mass-society that we are going to have to live with if we don’t evade the issue – as I do. The foulness of that life. That’s the future America is looking so brightly towards. I can’t help thinking that England’s wise in politely pretending that it can’t really exist.’
‘You are telling me that our time is one when we are learning how to live worse. Vell, I am telling that to you.’
‘But how does one be a man among men now?’
‘Ah, there is the question. You want me to give you ethics. But you must find them for yourself.’
‘But as you were saying, there seem very few around. The moral space in our lives seems to be shrinking fast.’
‘That’s so. And so we invite in politics. The ethics of politics tells: eliminate these, kill those, declare war, start revolutions. It drives out the ethics of personal living, of being a person, which tells: be kind, respect others, do good things. So I like your search. You are foolish, my friend, and you vill always do silly things. But I am admiring you a good deal. More tea for you?’
‘Thank you,’ said Walker, holding out his cup. ‘Actually it all grows more difficult. I feel very burdened just at the moment.’
‘Of course, ever since I have known you on that ship you have been so. Vell, let me guess. You are in love with fifteen vomen at one time, and now they are all pregnant and vish to marry you.’
‘Close,’ said Walker. ‘But not quite. I’m trying to divorce my wife.’
‘Vell, no doubt this is a more stupid thing than all the rest, but I vill assume there is some special Walker sense to it.’
‘I want to be sure I’m doing right, you see.’
‘Oh, you are not, but no matter.’
‘I don’t want to hurt her, you know.’ He felt in his pocket for a letter which had come that morning, a reply to the letter he had finished and sent, asking for his freedom. Elaine said, ‘You ask me to give you your freedom. But I haven’t got your freedom, Jim. I don’t remember ever seeing it. I think you must have taken it with you – do look through all your things. If it’s not there, I don’t think you ever had it. You can do what you want; you always could. You owe some things to me, but they’re not claimed very often. No, it’s not your freedom that’s missing, really, but your love. I think you ought to have a look for that too, because I think you’ll find it. And if it’s not over there, shouldn’t you come back home and look before you decide on this? I think that would be much better than coming back to me in a couple of years and saying it was a terrible mistake. And you know you’re quite capable of doing that.’ Walker handed the letter to Jochum; Jochum took out some old, wire-framed spectacles to read it. ‘Vell, are you capable?’ asked Jochum, when he had finished.
‘I suppose so. It depends on whether I go on finding what I think I’m looking for.’
Jochum looked at the letter again and said, ‘I’m afraid it is difficult. I think she loves you.’
‘Oh, she does.’
‘And you do not love her.’
‘Well, I don’t know. I’m not sure what it feels like, not sure what the word means.’
‘Ah, I understand,’ said Jochum. ‘Love is an emotion that other people feel towards you.’
‘No, not that. It’s just that my loyalties have changed. My mind has gone another way. I’m committed to things she doesn’t share. She holds me back from them. And in a way I’ve gone beyond that kind of affection.’
‘Oh yes, the cruelty of the writer. He must sacrifice his loved ones to write the better about love. It is a very old story.’
‘Well, it is like that, yes. I’ve grown a lot here. I’m moving towards things I’ve long missed. I think I’m moving towards being a real writer, a real artist. That means cutting some ropes, untying oneself from the shore.’
‘You want to marry someone else?’
‘No, it’s divorce, not marriage, I’m on with. I want to marry the universe.’
‘Ah, those old romantic weddings. The trouble with the universe is that it is so unfaithful. It runs around with so many people.’
‘But you see what I mean?’
‘No,’ said Jochum, ‘I don’t see. I think you are mad as a hatter.’
‘I am?’ asked Walker, looking pleased.
‘We all are, but it is always a good lesson to look hard at the victims who suffer by your ideology.’
‘There are always victims.’
‘Oh, I know, I am a victim from way back, that is why I am an exile. However, I must retire to the kitchen. Now I become a hausfrau. Read please the newspaper.’
Walker picked up the Party Bugle, and found in it, again, his own name. ‘Angry young man author James Walker, presently visiting BAU from England, lectures Wednesday, December 1, on The Writer’s Dilemma. Walker, one of Britain’s leading authors, earlier picked out Party as a town of “real nice people”, and said he preferred it to England. Maybe that’s Mr Walker’s dilemma.’
‘Did you see this?’ said Walker, angrily marching into the kitchen with the paragraph.
‘Ah, yes, I see you know how to please the press.’
‘Those aren’t my views.’
‘Of course not.’
‘And I didn’t say that.’
‘It is simply what you are expected to say. No one believes it, but it is nice to think that one day someone might really say such a thing. Now I would say it and mean it, but I am never asked.’
‘Say it and mean it?’
‘Of course,’ said Jochum, throwing some lentils into a pan, ‘I am a loyalist. This is the only country, the only town, I have. I love it much more than the citizens. I only see its virtues.’
‘I meant to ask you,’ said Walker, ‘did you have to sign a loyalty oath when you came? As a foreigner?’
‘I signed such an oath, but I am not a foreigner.’
‘You didn’t complain?’
‘I was pleased to sign it. This is what I am telling. I feel very loyal here.’
‘It offends me,’ said Walker.
‘Well, of course, you are a liberal.’
‘And a foreigner.’
‘But I thought that you told me you had discounted those old loyalties. You had cut the ropes.’
‘I have.’
‘Ah, you want to be a loyalist of nowhere. I want to be a loyalist of somewhere.’
‘A loyalist of the imagination,’ said Walker.
‘Vell, I hope you vill not make a cause of this. There are many people on campus who would be only too happy to use you to further their ends.’
‘Mightn’t they be good ends?’
‘Some of them.’
‘I have a taste for preserving freedom, because I enjoy it so much myself.’
‘Since I came here for freedom,’ said Jochum, ‘I have the same taste. On this we agree.’
‘But isn’t prescribing what we teach – and doesn’t the loyalty oath mean that? – a limitation of freedom?’
‘How does it prescribe what you teach?’
‘Well, how does one define what contributes to the overthrow of the American government? Supposing I praise the British National Health Service in class? Isn’t that menacing to the government, in a sense? I’m told there are people who think it is.’
‘I have never understood that the misuse of a device means that we should eliminate the device, only the misuse.’
‘But the device is a symptom of the prevalence of the misuse.’
‘Ah, now I agree. But you vill find that American universities are very vulnerable. Someone once defined liberals as people who embrace their destroyers. I think protected democracy is proper in a world where there are many destroyers. But please, why do we talk of these things on a pleasant evening?’
‘I have to decide what to do about the oath,’ said Walker.
‘Vell, I can offer a solution. I believe in personal solutions and here is one. Do not sign it – that vill ease your conscience – and hope that the filing system in the Administration Building is so terrible that nobody vill know.’
‘I’ve already raised the matter with Dr Bourbon.’
‘Even so.’
‘It’s a thought, a nice thought.’
‘Just a friendly suggestion,’ said Jochum, looking like a kind father as he beamed at Walker. Walker beamed back and sucked in the thick vegetable smell that rose from the pot Jochum was stirring. He was looking forward to a real, European meal.
Walker spent most of the next week writing his lecture on The Writer’s Dilemma. His writer’s dilemma was that he couldn’t think of anything to say. One day, when he was sitting in his office, late in the evening, when the rest of his colleagues who shared it with him had gone home, he was interrupted; Dr Bourbon had heard him typing and put his head in. ‘Hi, boy,’ he said, stuffing threads of tobacco into his pipe, and looking round to see whether Walker was alone. ‘Just come in to tell you President Coolidge is givin’ a little reception before yore lecture next Wednesday. ’Bout six. Drinks and a buffet. It’s a real honour, boy.’
‘I hope I finish writing it in time,’ said Walker.
‘That it? Well, I won’t look. Let it surprise me.’
‘It may,’ said Walker, smiling.
‘Be a lot of very important people there. The President and his wife; in fact the President may introduce you. Real honour. Then some of the state officials may come down, there’s an athletic meeting that afternoon. Be a good turn-out from the faculty, I guess. Thought I’d better warn you case you was thinkin’ of makin’ it informal. Better make it formal. Press’ll be there. Guess they’ll send a man down from the Dimity Gazette. That’s the biggest paper in the state. Dimity’s the state capital. I’d stick in some extra carbons so they can have copies of the text. These pressmen, they’re nice fellows, but they don’t all write shorthand very good.’
‘I know,’ said Walker, thinking of his recent press experiences.
‘I look forward to it, Mis’ Walker,’ said Bourbon, nodding and going out.
Walker didn’t. On the evening of the lecture it rained, the mountains went from view; and the trees were wet and fragrant as Walker set out in his mackintosh to the President’s House, or rather mansion, a large white property in the colonial manner hidden behind trees on a corner of the campus. Here President Coolidge and his wife, a handsome woman in a flame-red dress, stood formally just inside the door, shaking hands with the entrants. Two co-eds, in white blouses and black skirts, took the coats of the guests – none of them wet save for Walker’s – and hung them on racks on the porch.
‘Nice to see you, Walk,’ said the President, crinkling his smile, ‘you’re our guest of honour tonight.’ He put his hand on his wife’s arm – she was talking to Harris Bourbon, who looked ill at ease in a vast black area of dinner jacket – and said, ‘You must meet our guest of honour, Hetty.’
‘Oh, the great man himself,’ said the President’s wife, turning, ‘I’ve heard so much . . .’
‘The students really love this man,’ said Bourbon. ‘Why, I was talkin’ to Miss Handlin, she’s wild about you, Mis’ Walker.’ Two male students, also in white shirts and black flannels, a martini man and a Manhattan man, approached simultaneously with trays of drinks. Bourbon ushered Walker forward into the big, elegantly furnished room, a concord of decoration, obviously done by a designer with a taste for big hangings and Aztec masks. Walker found here a number of his colleagues – Evadne Heilman, big and beaming, a loose-fitting woman in a tight-fitting dress; and Bernard Froelich, in a dark Ivy League suit; and Hamish Wagner, red-haired and poised to say ‘Pip pip.’ ‘I got some new people you ought to know,’ said Bourbon, introducing him to Selena May Sugar (‘she’s one of the committee brung you here’), a local novelist, a moustachioed man clearly modelled on Mark Twain (‘writes about the west – begins with the creakin’ of the covered wagons and ends with the discovery of oil’), two reporters from Dimity (‘bastions of the press’), and the Mayor of Party, a dapper little man in a string tie and a lightweight suit with gold threads shining in it. ‘Howdy, sir,’ said the Mayor. ‘We’re real glad to know you like it here. We do.’
Walker had been feeling nervous all week; now he felt virtually hysterical. His speech, under his arm in a blue folder he had bought for ten cents from the college bookstore, seemed utter nonsense to him. He drank three martinis in quick succession, and talked to the Mayor about the history of Party. ‘My granddaddy and grandmaw came out here in a covered wagon, to settle. Grandmaw still talks about it. Recollects coming out here in a covered dish. Her mind’s going a little. Lot of people in town who came out that way. You can still smell the frontier here. There were people coming through here still looking for gold when I was a boy.’ The President interrupted to ask Walker to partake of a buffet supper. At the long cloth-covered table where the morsels were laid out, Walker found himself in line with Hamish Wagner. ‘Pip pip, old boy,’ said Hamish.
‘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.