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Malcolm Bradbury on Stepping Westward

Stepping Westward is my second novel. I wrote it, mostly in the United States, at the beginning of the Sixties, when I and the world were both visibly changing. My first book, Eating People is Wrong, had been about the Fifties: a sombre time, when there was both economic and moral austerity, even the dogs walked soberly in the streets, and there were almost no girls. I spent most of the decade as an eternal graduate student, working away in the British Museum on a thesis on the impact of this on that. It was a time when Americanization was passing through Europe like what many of the young in those days still had to take – a dose of salts. Britain was losing an Empire and gaining a washing machine, and America was where, it seemed, everything that was best came from – the best jazz, the best novels, the best ice-cream, the best cars, the best films. In fact America, the America of Arthur Miller and Marilyn Monroe, J. D. Salinger and Dave Brubeck, Jack Kerouac and Allen Ginsberg, Elvis and the Kelvinator, haunted the imaginations of the Fifties young. The old myth of European liberation in the New World never seemed stronger, and adventurous journeys to the new frontier were very much in order. So one day, when my thesis was finished, I put down my Leavis, put on my Levis, and sailed for the United States.

This is the mood that fills this novel, and I hope it seems like a joyous one. For through much of the later Fifties and well into the Sixties I became a regular transatlantic traveller, back and forth between Britain and the United States. In fact I became a typical example of a constant figure of the time, Midatlantic Man. If you look round in government, the media, business, and academic life, you can find them still, the men and women touched by America over the post-war years. Midatlantic Man could always be recognized, then and still.

In those days sailing for America was something you still could do. The transatlantic liners still ran, those great floating Harrods, and, cruise liners for some, they were immigrant ships for others. Little was it known up there in first class, but down at the bottom of these ships, every summer, a whole other world was hidden. Tucked four to a cabin, in windowless rooms below the waterline, probably as ballast, was an entire generation of young men and women, the Sabbatical Generation. For, every summer, people on mysterious grants – Guggenheims and Rockefellers, Fulbrights and Commonwealths – would line up on the piers on either side of the Atlantic and exchange themselves for each other. Scholars and critics, would-be novelists and biographers, scientists and sociologists, they would crowd aboard the great liners in their huddled masses. Looking back now, it seems to me that, amid the Cunard cosiness, the inlaid panelling, the white-coated and rather sinister waiters, the ceremonial breakfast kippers, much of the coming intellectual might of Britain assembled. Here were Anthony Howard and Bamber Gascoigne, Dennis Healey and Shirley Williams, bright young scholars, most from Oxford or Cambridge, in my case from somewhere more modest. They all carried mint theses, and had research projects at the other end. They all had one head, and they were taking it to America.