Malcolm Bradbury was
my oldest and closest friend in the literary world. Our careers were so closely
entwined, especially in the early years, that I feel as if some vital support
has been cut away by his death which can never be replaced. We first met as
young lecturers appointed to the English department of the University of
Birmingham, I in 1960, he a year later. Bliss was it to be alive in that dawn
of expansion in higher education! We were both grammar-school scholarship boys
from lower-middle-class backgrounds, non-Oxbridge, teaching modern English and
American literature to eager students of similar social origins.
We
had both published our first novels, though his (Eating People is Wrong) had caused more of a stir. He was also already well
established as a humorist and literary critic. His confident professionalism
and readiness to turn his hand to any literary task impressed me and inspired
emulation. It was typical of his exceptional generosity of spirit that he
actively encouraged me to work the vein of comedy that was his own forte, and
in due course introduced me to his agent and his publisher. In 1963 he
initiated a collaboration between the two of us and a gifted Birmingham under
graduate, Jim Duckett (who died young) to write a
Beyond the Fringe-type revue for the Birmingham Rep. I have happy memories of
hilarious script-writing sessions, with Jim and me pacing up and down, while
Malcolm pounded out and improved our lines on an upright typewriter. I'm not
sure that writing was ever such fun again.
A
single university department could hardly contain two satirical campus
novelists indefinitely, and in the event it was Malcolm who moved, to the fresh
fields and pastures new of the University of East Anglia, where he built a
distinguished career as both professor of American studies and director of the
phenomenally successful MA in creative writing. (I doubt if any such course in
the world has seen a higher proportion of its graduates get their work
published.)
Inevitably,
we saw much less of each other, and regretted that, but it never affected the
essential bond between us. We became in a way literary twins - sometimes
farcically confused, always with a quick, intuitive sense of each other's
thoughts and feelings.
As
Bakhtin observed, all writers glance aside at their
peers as they write, and it is Malcolm whom I most often evoke as imagined
reader, to test the quality of the work. His masterpiece was The History Man,
followed closely in my estimation by Rates of Exchange, but all his fiction
will go on being read and relished for its witty and acute observation of
contemporary life and thoughtful, sometimes dark insights into the plight of
the liberal humanist in the modern and postmodern world.
Malcolm
also produced an extraordinary range and quantity of writings in almost every
other possible form; literary history and criticism, essays, parodies,
travelogues, television and film scripts, stage plays, poems, anthologies and
reviews. (He must have written over a thousand book reviews, and I never saw
one that was malicious or destructive.)
Though
he shared the high modernist belief in the importance of art and artistic
experiment, he also enjoyed writing for a large popular audience on occasion,
and took justifiable pride in having mastered the techniques appropriate to
different media. In his last novel, To the Hermitage, he deftly spliced
together a wry Shandean self-portrait with a vivid
historical evocation of Diderot, whose encyclopaedic intellectual energy he
admired and whose disappointments stirred his sympathies. The last, elegiac
section of that book is charged with deep personal feeling which now seems
doubly poignant.
While
producing this immense body of work Malcolm also did a great many other things
in the fields of culture and education. Even after his retirement from UEA he
lectured at home and abroad and attended conferences and sat on committees and
awarded prizes. He found it difficult to say no to any invitation that
concerned literature, or to stay away for long from the typewriter or computer
keyboard. Those who loved him wished he would not tax himself so remorselessly,
and wish so even more at his untimely death. But it was useless to protest.
Writing was his life.
Published by David Lodge
The Guardian, Tuesday November 28 2000
guardian.co.uk © Guardian News and Media Limited 2008
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/nov/29/fiction.highereducation
Other interesting articles
about his death: [Next] [1]
[2] [3] [4] [5] [6]
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