Malcolm Bradbury — novelist, teacher, critic, and scriptwriter — died in England on November 27, at the age of sixty-eight. He was best known for The History Man, one of the great academic comedies ever written, and Rates of Exchange, a comic attack on communism set in a fictitious country in Eastern Europe. But through all his stories — from the 1959 Eating People Is Wrong to this year’s To the Hermitage — there ran a high moral sense that could find expression only in laughter. He was an occasional contributor to THE WEEKLY STANDARD, and we reprint in his memory this tale of his first trip to America in the 1950s.
— The Editors
I was not an angry young man, perhaps, since to me the angry young men were all old, ten years or so older than I was. But I was a niggling one, an uneasy figure struggling in my Englishness, fighting to get out. The British provinces had been swallowing me like an eiderdown; America seemed the great, good place. I left, a young Nottingham intellectual with five published articles to his credit, all in journals of absolutely no importance, and sailed to Florida on a freighter. From there, I took the bus to New York, and rode in the endless elevator up to the top of the Empire State building; below was the great metropolis, looking like a gigantic waffle-iron.
Excitement grew; I took the ferry and sailed out to the Statue of Liberty, while fireboats sprayed me with jets of water; I wandered Macy’s and bought nylon shirts, then a new invention that made you ping with static electricity when you put them on and off. The Beat Generation was riding high: I went to poetry readings in gloomy bagel shops in Greenwich Village, where poets in dark glasses would look up to the ceiling and cry, “Come, little bird of poetry, fly down to me” (actually it rarely did). I talked to deviants on benches outside the New York Public Library, while dapper secretaries went by, carrying plastic Lord and Taylor bags. It was different, exciting; yet I still didn’t feel I knew what America was.
Then one day the revelation came. I was staying with the parents of a Jewish friend in their small apartment in the Bronx. It was not a notable apartment but it did have a notable American kitchen: a shining bulbous icebox, a glinting split-level cooker, Formica worktops, a whirring blender and mixer, a toaster that threw bread in the air as if in sport, and in the middle of the sink, an object called a Dispose-All which consumed the kitchen refuse and sent it all straight to the sewage company. Commonplace now, it was a wonder of the 1950s; I used to wander in there frequently, just to experience it all.
One day my host came and found me there, staring down the Dispose-All’s magnificent orifice, as if seeking the meaning of life. Not speaking, he opened the door of the icebox, took out an entire uncooked chicken, thrust the chicken into the grinder, and switched on. Standing there, watching the machine consume an entire bird, I knew at last that I had seen the New World, and it worked.
I stayed on in the States for a long time, in the American heartland, teaching freshman composition — better known as Readin’, Writin’, Speakin’, and List’nin’ — at a university in a cornfield in the midwest. Here I taught coeds in tight sweaters, cantilevered bras, and Elizabeth Arden make-up, and seven-foot-tall footballers with crew cuts and huge ears, who could sit in the third row and still put up their feet on my desk.
I taught them the simple things of life: how to use human language, how to write on pieces of paper from left to right, how to open books without splitting the spine, how to put in verbs to give a sentence the completeness of a sentence. I taught a lot, but I learned more. My students called for me in cars and took me out on dates, teaching me how to drink milkshakes; they showed me the way to the Doosie Duds, where I washed my socks, and the Piggly Wiggly, where I bought comestibles and acquired free Melamine tableware on food orders of five dollars or more.
I thought I was growing American, though the students never quite agreed. “Pip-pip, old chap,” they said as they came into a class, “Bin shootin’? How’s the Queen?” Indeed, as time went by, a certain excess of Englishness crept into my character.
Though by origin a good deal closer to Jimmy Porter than the Duke of Windsor, I acquired a degree of bearing. My old cheap Harris tweed sports jacket with plastic patches on the elbow (only Oxbridge undergraduates could afford leather) acquired a fine old glow, as if it had been carefully smoked over a peat fire by willing peasants, and then systematically stained with claret by family butlers. I became an expert in politeness, rank, the royal family, hunting, and warm beer.
At the same time my literary ambitions were proceeding apace. For in addition to haunting the coffee bars of Nottingham, shouting about Sartre and nibbling the ears of leggy girls named Ernestine, I had spent three years being a student at a certain nameless English provincial university. A strange youth, who wore pink intellectual shirts and clip-on bow ties that kept falling off suddenly into cups of black coffee, and spent most of those three years writing a novel, about, of course, an English provincial university, I used to sit for hours in the university entrance hall, ostentatiously correcting a large sheet of proofs: “He’s a writer,” my two or three friends would explain to any passing visitor who happened to stumble in, usually under the impression that they had found the public library. I had once seen T. S. Eliot, or someone very like him, emerge from the offices of Faber and Faber in Russell Square, so I felt alert to everything that was happening in the literary scene; I had even been discovered — by a college friend, the editor of the literary magazine, a man named Michael Orsler, an impressive figure who used to stand naked at the window of his room, shouting “Sex rules the world” to occasional passing suburban shoppers.
Everyone assured me that a book about an English provincial university would never sell, and this confirmed me in my integrity. It was to these talents that I now turned in my office in the midwestern heartland; passing strangers, wandering close to the English department late at night, would hear the tapping of typewriter keys as I wrote down for posterity the benefits of my Anglo-American experience in articles that went to Vogue and Harper’s and Punch and somehow managed to appear in print.
It all came to an end, of course. My contract ceased after a year. I posted the final grades on the door of my office and locked myself in, while disappointed students shouted through the key-hole in fury. I said goodbye to my friends, who explained that they had not understood a word I had said all year, because of my foreign accent. I knew, with a kind of dread in my heart, that it was time to go home to England. I knew that going home was always an agony, if not a disaster; that I would miss what I had enjoyed.
I had learned much about America, in the Doosie Duds and the Piggly Wiggly and the long car and bus journeys I had taken right across the nation, there to find more Doosie Duds, more Piggly Wigglies, more and more and more. In a dark, or at any rate decidedly ill-lit, night of the soul, I put all my Melamine tableware into my great footlocker, heaved it lightly under one shoulder, and set off to New York City and the Cunard pier, on that most ancient of quests, the tale of return. Great liners with big red funnels still ran in those days, though plane travel was becoming fashionable in some quarters.
Looking forward to six days of leisure, I climbed aboard the great vessel, a haven of Englishness, smelling of marchionesses, carbolic soap, and good old kippers. Adjustment, after a long spell of America, was exactly what I needed. For I looked around at my fellow passengers, and the severe guardians who formed the crew. They appeared to me odd, until I realized that they were simply English. I would need to learn England all over again.
From the introduction to Malcolm Bradbury’s All Dressed Up And Nowhere To Go: The Poor Man’s Guide to Affluent Society (1982).
