STEPPING WESTWARD.

by Malcolm Bradbury

The Benedict Arnold University in America's Midwest perfectly fulfils all the criteria of an excellent academic a bookstore well stocked with ring binders, good parking facilities and efficient air conditioning. Since the beginning of the year the English Department has even boasted a genuine Englishman, James Walker, teacher of creative writing. Once hailed as an angry young man, Walker is, in fact, a mildly irritated man in his thirties with three 'promising' novels to his credit. Socially inadequate, a dedicated liberal short on commitment and drive, Walker is not, perhaps, an ideal candidate for the post he was summoned so auspiciously to fill...

Genres: Fiction, Humor, Novels

416 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1965

About the author

Sir Malcolm Stanley Bradbury CBE was an English author and academic. He is best known to a wider public as a novelist. Although he is often compared with David Lodge, his friend and a contemporary as a British exponent of the campus novel genre, Bradbury's books are consistently darker in mood and less playful both in style and language. His best known novel The History Man, published in 1975, is a dark satire of academic life in the "glass and steel" universities—the then-fashionable newer universities of England that had followed their "redbrick" predecessors—which in 1981 was made into a successful BBC television serial. The protagonist is the hypocritical Howard Kirk, a sociology professor at the fictional University of Watermouth.

He completed his PhD in American studies at the University of Manchester in 1962, moving to the University of East Anglia (his second novel, Stepping Westward, appeared in 1965), where he became Professor of American Studies in 1970 and launched the world-renowned MA in Creative Writing course, which Ian McEwan and Kazuo Ishiguro both attended. He published Possibilities: Essays on the State of the Novel in 1973, The History Man in 1975, Who Do You Think You Are? in 1976, Rates of Exchange in 1983, Cuts: A Very Short Novel in 1987, retiring from academic life in 1995. Malcolm Bradbury became a Commander of the British Empire in 1991 for services to Literature, and was made a Knight Bachelor in the New Year Honours 2000, again for services to Literature.

Bradbury was a productive academic writer as well as a successful teacher; an expert on the modern novel, he published books on Evelyn Waugh, Saul Bellow and E. M. Forster, as well as editions of such modern classics as F. Scott Fitzgerald's The Great Gatsby, and a number of surveys and handbooks of modern fiction, both British and American.

He also wrote extensively for television, including scripting series such as Anything More Would Be Greedy, The Gravy Train, the sequel The Gravy Train Goes East (which explored life in Bradbury's fictional Slaka), and adapting novels such as Tom Sharpe's Blott on the Landscape and Porterhouse Blue, Alison Lurie's Imaginary Friends and Kingsley Amis's The Green Man. His last television script was for Dalziel and Pascoe series 5, produced by Andy Rowley. The episode 'Foreign Bodies' was screened on BBC One on July 15, 2000.

Reviews

[Katrin · Rating 3 out of 5]

An entertaining campus novel in the vein of David Lodge's "Changing Places", which I loved when I was at school (though this one was earlier, I think). It describes the bewildering journey of Englishman and writer James Walker, who, in 1965, travels to a (fictitious) Western state in the USA to become Writer in Residence at a university. The book is chock-full of (funny) clichés about the UK and the US, and takes pleasure in letting the two worlds collide. Some of these cultural differences are still there, some aren't. Lots of misunderstandings and disasters ensue. It is also a book about how we WANT people to be (in the US, everyone wants James to wear Tweed jackets). Mildly funny; a little old-fashioned; likeable.

[Chris · Rating 3 out of 5]

Hot on the heels of "Eating People is Wrong", his first and rather unfulfilling novel, I moved on to "Stepping Westward" with hope in my heart. I found that the second novel has a surer touch, and a clearer direction, at least to begin with.

It sets out to tell the story of James Walker, a writer and academic, brought out of his shell into the modern world (of the 1960's), and what becomes of him there.

Bradbury devotes a lot of time to the journey to America, and chooses to conclude the book with something of a road trip involving one of the young women he meets on the boat, although she disappears from the novel in between.

The campus element was rather underwhelming, as even though out of his depth in geographical terms, Walker has simply left one cocoon for another, which he has begun to settle into when his love interest from the boat resurfaces. (We briefly meet his wife and child back in England at the beginning of the book.) He is more interesting trying to cope with the world beyond the university, where he is truly flummoxed. (I also found this in the previous novel. It is only in the chapter located in the hospital ward where the book truly comes to life.) I also found the campus characters the flattest and least convincing, to some extent caricatures that seem to exist only to contrast with Walker's perceived "English-ness". Elsewhere in the book I liked the characters rather better. Even those who only made a brief appearance seemed to have an existence beyond the page.

There are some humorous moments in the book but I would not describe it as a comic novel. In many ways it is more of a tragedy, though I won't "spoil" by going into too much detail on that point. Suffice to say that the author indulges in some self-exploration and meditation on the human condition.

To sum up, I cannot wish the book unread, but on mature reflection I feel the need to, at least temporarily, abandon my Bradbury phase, although I might return to one of the later novels at some future time.

[Reader · Rating 3 out of 5]

Quite interesting reading this shortly after Mr Donald’s election.

How alien Republicans are.

Europe and America no longer have any shared interests

[Robin Nicholas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Recently, I was invited to a Kansas university to lecture so thought I would get in the mood by rereading one of the campus novels made famous by David Lodge and Malcolm Bradbury which followed the fortunes of ill-equipped Englishmen and overconfident Americans on exchange visits. In Bradbury's Stepping Westward, James Walker, a rather unattractive, diffident, spiky and very English writer, is invited to a midwestern university where he is obliged to run a course on creative writing though he has no teaching or, indeed, academic experience. Surprisingly, he engages with 2 women on the boat out to the US and has some affairs at the university, largely manipulated by a trouble-making member of staff who has mischievously engineered the visit for his own ends. Things take off when Walker is required to sign the US loyalty oath. There are some nice examples of the differences in culture including bathroom extractor fans, clearly a novelty at the time on this side of the pond, and some unpleasant American adolescents whose type I recognised on my previous visits who appear threatened by the English for some reason. Overall, an enjoyable though unlikely book and not much like my recent visit, thankfully. The reciprocal visit was even better for me, thanks to a very Anglophilic academic.

[Matthew Leigh · Rating 3 out of 5]

Malcolm Bradbury was sort of famous in my teenage years, mainly for 'The History Man'. This is another campus novel. The rather ineffectual hero travels over on a Cunard lines and then by train to take up a position as a visiting professor of creative writing in a mid-western university. He meets an academic refugee from Nazism, a rather desperate English virgin, a group of bagpipe players from one of the Seven Sisters (Hillesley could be a mash-up of Wellesley and Mount Holyoke), and a wonderfully awful English grande dame. Benedict Arnold University has its own comic types aplenty but not too much of a plot. Bradbury can write but he seems unsure whether he's writing a mild sex comedy or a novel of ideas about British and American versions of liberalism. My wife found me a battered old Penguin priced at only £1. I doubt that we'll see it in prin again very soon.

[Andy Carter · Rating 4 out of 5]

Set and written in 1965, the main character is Jim Walker, a moderately successful author from Nottingham. He’s in his early 30’s, married with one child. Out of the blue he is invited to be a writer-in-residence at an American university, Benedict Arnold.

What ensues is a clash of cultures, with the provincial and fairly innocent Jim having to contend with the internal politics of the university, which is split between conservative, post-McCarthyism and the emerging radicalism of the 60s.

It’s an amusing read, with Bernard Froelich especially prominent as the scheming prototype of Howard Kirk of “The History Man”.

[Graham · Rating 2 out of 5]

Didn't really enjoy this book very much. Started off thinking it was going to be funny but then it slowed down and wasn't really sure where it was going and didn't really understand the point being made. Perhaps because it was set in the 60s with the odd promiscuity.

[Sean Walsh · Rating 4 out of 5]

An excellent and enjoyable tale!

[Emma · Rating 4 out of 5]

Of its time, but perfectly enjoyable, especially if you find it for free at a tube station.

[Olly Randall · Rating 5 out of 5]

A cosy, funny, and delightful read.