The great listener

In 1970 the young Ian McEwan arrived in Norwich to study literature with Malcolm Bradbury. A year later he left as a writer. Here he describes how the sociable don changed his life

Like Howard Kirk, the academic Machiavel of The History Man, Malcolm liked a good party. Just as that novel is structured round social gatherings, so were the literary conferences over which Malcolm brilliantly presided. A Cambridge college, a German monastery set in a desert of potato fields, a disintegrating Polish palace, were some of the settings for the best intellectual revels of the 80s and 90s.

Music, dancing and sex were not conspicuous ingredients. The business was talking and drinking - complementary human pleasures in which Malcolm took serious delight. After the last conference session of the afternoon, people would begin to gather in the bar and the circles formed. Limitless wine, writers far from home with nowhere else to go, nothing else to do: a delicious freedom was in the air, and the anticipation of a long journey into the night across unknown territory.

Naturally, for such a social creature, the seminar was Malcolm's element. I remember the first I attended, in October 1970. I had arrived at the University of East Anglia to do the MA in literature. The other outsider was Jon Cook from Cambridge, who is now dean of studies at UEA. Malcolm was in his late 30s then, and with his piled-up hair, narrow knitted tie and lopsided grin there was something of the miscreant teddy boy about him. In his hesitant, lilting voice - so hard to place, that accent - he set out for us the course of study ahead - 19th-century comparative literature, the modern American novel, literary theory - and then led us into a general discussion about the novel.

It was a brilliant session. Within minutes, it seemed, he had communicated a sense of adventure - the vitality of the novel as a form, its deep seriousness, its variety, the pleasures as well as the instruction in life it conveyed, its rich past and unguessable future. The general discussion began - a more formal version of the partying years ahead of us.

Malcolm was always a good listener. He emboldened his students to feel clever. He could make the most reticent of them feel like Oscar Wilde. It was part of Malcolm's automatic generosity to laugh easily at other people's jokes. Who can forget that delighted, whinnying giggle?

I would have denied it at the time, but I was keen to impress him. I think we were all intellectual show-offs that day. I remember parading my reading of Ortega y Gasset. Jon Cook appeared to be the world expert on Hegel. How tolerant Malcolm must have been. But he knew what he was about. We came away exhilarated, and determined to start on the huge reading list he had given us.

There was no dedicated creative writing course at UEA in 1970. However, along with the academic work, one was permitted to submit fiction at the end of the year in place of a long essay. This was a startling innovation in those days. Three weeks after our first seminar, I gave Malcolm an essay on the American novelist, John Barth, and a carbon copy of my first short story, Conversation With a Cupboardman. We met in a pub to discuss the story. He was mostly interested in getting me to describe what I was trying to do. I didn't really know. The story seemed to have written itself.

"I like it," he said at last, unemphatically. "It's publishable. But let's not think about that now. What are you going to write next?"

"Another short story. It's about a boy anxious to lose his virginity who makes love to his younger sister."

"Can I have it by the end of the month?"

I handed in essays to Malcolm on Borges, Mailer, and on theories of representation, and I continued to give him stories, some of which were collected up later into my first book. It was not his style to interfere in the style, structure or content of what I did. But he knew how to motivate.

Fiction, as I was seeing it through his eyes, was the highest calling. I continued to fulfil the academic requirements, but I only cared about the stories. Malcolm was my reading public. I wrote in the certainty that I would receive a close reading - and this was an extraordinary privilege.

His reading list alone was changing my life. It was the Americans, above all, that he wanted us to read. The ambition, the social range, the expressive freedom of American writing made English fiction seem poky and grey. To find bold and violent colours became my imperative. Echoes of Roth and Burroughs crept into my stories. The struggle with influence, Malcolm told me once in the pub, is part of the pleasure of finding your own way.

In the years that followed we met from time to time in whatever monastery or palace the British Council had rented for conferences. There, Malcolm's tentative, judicious style granted a licence to younger writers. He was fair, so we could be savage in our judgments. As a critic, he lacked cruelty almost to a fault. He was an instinctive celebrator, rather than destroyer, of reputations. However late it got, Malcolm would be one of the last to get to bed. What he relished was a conversation with a direction, a beat. Gossip was fine too.

Another bottle is opened. A certain writer, someone says, no longer does interviews. Only press conferences. Publicity hunger versus reclusiveness bring us to Pynchon, until the fatwa in 1989, the world's most hunted writer. Inflated, whimsical, a world view stifled by paranoia, someone says. Malcolm hears this out, then defends; inflated, only to a certain cast of English mind - to some novelists paranoia is not a disabling mental condition, but the motor of ingenious plot making.

By way of Melville, through Kafka, we arrive at an eminent novelist. The consensus around the table is that her sentences are no good - cliche-heavy, unrhythmic, no surprises. Therefore, she is no bloody good at all. Malcolm champions her: it's true up to a point about the sentences, but there's a certain kind of writing that gives pleasure through its design, its architecture. In the geometry of these moral schemes there's a beauty that no individual sentence can yield.

Can a good novel be written badly? We've been around this a number of times before. And who are today's best sentence makers? Malcolm makes the case for Martin Amis, together with some exquisite examples he has by heart. Two weeks before, Martin has given Malcolm a finely executed pistol-whipping in the Observer for his novel, Rates of Exchange. The critic remains scrupulously detached from the workaday resentments of the novelist.

Since his death, there is one encounter with Malcolm that haunts me. In the dazed hour immediately after winning the Booker Prize in 1998, I was surrounded by excited voices, and pulled from press conference to interviews, and from crowded rooms to answer questions in television trucks and radio cars. At some point I lost the Booker publicity people, or they lost me, and I stepped through a door by mistake into an empty hall. I went through another door, and found myself in a long straight ill-lit corridor.

Coming towards me, from some distance away, were Malcolm and his wife Elizabeth. We approached each other as in dream, and I remember thinking, half seriously, that this was what it might be like to be dead. In the warmth of his embrace was concentrated all the generosity of this gifted teacher and writer. His artful reticence and his passion for literature transformed my life.

Published by Ian McEwan

The Guardian, Tuesday November 29 2000

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2000/nov/29/fiction.highereducation1

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