Lord of misrule

It outraged moralists and feminists, but Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man was one of the most influential novels of the 1970s. David Lodge hails a modern classic

The title of Malcolm Bradbury's third novel, published in 1975, has become a proverbial phrase, invoked in journalistic headlines and echoed by other writers (eg Alan Bennett's The History Boys) without any thematic reference to its source. To understand why The History Man impressed itself so deeply on the British collective consciousness and the English language, the novel itself must be placed in its historical context - or contexts (for there were two).

Bradbury is often labelled a "campus novelist", but in his work, as in all the best examples of the genre, the small world of the university is a stage for the dramatisation and examination of larger issues. The History Man is set almost entirely in and around the University of Watermouth, a fictitious town on the south coast of England, but it dealt with an international phenomenon, the movement for revolutionary change in social, political and cultural life which erupted in western Europe and the United States in the late 1960s, and set the progressive agenda until it ran out of steam at the end of the 70s. It was a complex phenomenon, made up of many different elements from Marxism and Maoism to rock music and recreational drugs, but it was essentially a rebellion of youth against a patriarchal old order, largely inspired by middle-aged gurus, and launched from the expanding universities of the post-war world.

I dealt with the phenomenon in a fairly light-hearted way in my own novel Changing Places: a tale of two campuses, published in the same year as The History Man. Bradbury's take on it was darker and more troubled. The University of East Anglia, to which he moved from Birmingham (where we were colleagues) in 1966, was one of several new residential universities built in England in the 1960s on landscaped sites at the edge of cathedral cities and county towns. At the time they were seen as exciting and trendy places, committed to educational innovation, and therefore especially open to the influence of the new counterculture. But all institutions of higher education were affected. Students, herded together and suddenly removed from parental control, were ripe for ideological awakening and sexual experiment, which sometimes turned into indoctrination and exploitation by their teachers.

Bradbury observed this scene with a satirical relish for its absurdities and contradictions, and a sombre concern about its social and cultural effects - in particular its programmatic rejection of the values which he held dear: respect for the individual, moral responsibility for one's actions, social progress through consensus rather than conflict and what one of the remnants of liberal humanism in the novel, Henry Beamish, calls rather mystically, "the attachment of knowable people and the gentleness of relationship".

The action of the novel is placed very precisely in 1972, just when the first flush of enthusiasm for the late-60s revolution began to fade, and those who had hitched their wagon to that Zeitgeist were concerned to keep its momentum going. One such is the central character, a sociology lecturer in his early 30s called Howard Kirk. Sociology was the key humanities discipline of the time, especially in the new universities, and well adapted to mediate the new progressive ideas. Literature departments were just as hospitable to the counterculture, and as internally divided about it, but the chief opponent of Kirk's views in the novel, and spokeswoman for "liberalism, humanism, and moral responsibility", is a lecturer in English literature: Annie Callendar. It is she who identifies Kirk, in academic shorthand, as "a history man".

In The Poverty of Historicism (1961) the philosopher Karl Popper defined historicism as "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms', the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history". Marxism is the most obvious modern exemplar of this kind of thinking, and it is the chief though not the only source of inspiration for Howard Kirk's radicalism. The words "history" and "inevitable" are constantly on his lips. He believes the plot of history has just entered a critical phase from which a new world of human freedom and possibility will be born, and that it is his duty to help it along by some smaller-scale plots of his own. Conveniently, this mission coincides with his inexhaustible appetite for intrigue, control, and sexual conquest.

The History Man disconcerted many readers who had enjoyed the more genial comedy of Bradbury's previous novels. Even those who admired it did not find it a comfortable or comforting book, while those who resisted and rejected its implications found they could not put it down. The discomfort was caused by the fact that there is no character with whom the reader can happily identify, and no authorial assistance in the task of interpretation and judgment. The book's power to grip even the resistant reader is the product of a tightly constructed narrative and a distinctive, strangely hypnotic verbal style. This is how it begins:

Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. The recess of summer is over, when holidays are taken, newspapers shrink, history itself seems momentarily to falter and stop. But the papers are thickening and filling again; things seem to be happening; back from Corfu and Sete, Positano and Leningrad, the people are parking their cars and campers in their drives, and opening their diaries, and calling up other people on the telephone . . . Everywhere there are new developments, new indignities; the intelligent people survey the autumn world, and liberal and radical hackles rise, and fresh faces are about, and the sun shines fitfully, and the telephones ring. So, sensing the climate, some people called the Kirks, a well-known couple, decide to have a party.

This is the authorial voice - knowing, sardonic, and educated, but also detached, impersonal, opaque. The narration here, and throughout most of the novel, is in the present tense, not like a story-teller recounting something that has already happened, but more like the verbal equivalent of a movie camera, tracking the characters through space and time into an unknown future. If you open the book at random you see dense blocks of print in which descriptive sentences and dialogue are packed together without interpretive commentary or the presentation of the characters' private thoughts and feelings in free indirect style. When he wakes on the morning after the party, "In Howard's head is a dry image of a person: Felicity Phee, a mottling of spots above her breasts." But that is as far as we are allowed to see into Howard's mind: we don't discover what he thinks about having had sex with his student the night before. The passage proceeds:

He activates muscular mechanisms; he gets out of bed and walks, through the party detritus and the unredeemed daylight, to the bathroom. He urinates into the bowl; he takes his razor from the medicine cabinet, and unravels the cord. He plugs the razor into two black holes under the white globe of the light.

There are hundreds of sentences like these. They are largely purged of metaphor (which means that any hint of it, as in "unredeemed" and "black holes", has a powerful effect) and completely lacking in what rhetoricians call "elegant variation," the avoidance of verbal and syntactical repetition. The style of the book is full of deliberate repetition, sometimes taken to extreme lengths - "The floors are being cleaned by a cleaner with a cleaner."

The unsettling absence of depth or interiority in the narrative mimics the negation, implicit in Howard's deterministic ideology, of the individual human consciousness on which liberal humanism is founded. This doesn't mean that the novel is empty of thoughts, feelings, anxieties and desires. The characters talk about such things obsessively. Why does Howard's friend and colleague Henry Beamish have so many accidents? Why does his wife Myra want to leave him? Why is Barbara Kirk unhappy? What does Felicity Phee want from Howard? Why is he such a compulsive philanderer? These questions are addressed continually in dialogue between the characters, but their answers conflict, or are self-contradictory, and none is privileged. The reader must pick and choose among them in forming his or her own interpretation of the story.

The action takes place mainly in the first week of the autumn term. We see Kirk presiding over his party like a Lord of Misrule, beginning his exploitative affair with Felicity Phee while continuing to sleep with his colleague Flora Beniform and endeavouring to bed Miss Callendar, plotting a totally factitious protest movement on campus and discriminating outrageously against a student of conservative views. When it seems that this last action will bring about his own downfall, Kirk goes in search of the student's ally, Annie Callendar. He seeks out the man who had brought her to his party, "a depressed-looking figure who, ten years earlier, had produced two tolerably well-known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern". The novelist (no prizes for guessing his identity) refuses to tell Howard where she lives, but he tracks her down in her old-fashioned flat and seduces her in her old-fashioned bed. She is hesitant, reluctant, but ultimately willing.

No single element in The History Man provoked more discussion and disagreement among its readers than Annie Callendar's capitulation to Howard Kirk. Feminists and traditional moralists were equally disappointed or outraged by it. Couples quarrelled about it. What gave offence to many was that a character who is presented as satisfying his own ego under guise of supporting a collective revolution does not get his comeuppance, as the development of the plot seems to promise, but is allowed to escape punishment and even to triumph at the end of the story. By this, I take it, Bradbury meant to imply that liberal humanism, with its built-in tolerance and self-doubt, is always vulnerable to those who are convinced they have a monopoly of the truth; but perhaps too there is an acknowledgement that the representatives of liberal humanism in the novel are a pretty spineless lot, and a grudging admiration for Kirk's energy and determination to make things happen.

The novel was not an instant success when first published. It divided reviewers, some of whom did not get the point of its style. It was not shortlisted for the Booker prize and it was not a bestseller. It was written against the grain of the times, and the bien pensants, however much they secretly relished its satirical wit, were reluctant to approve it publicly. But gradually it was recognised as one of the key books of the 1970s.

And then, at the beginning of the next decade, it had a second lease of life and reached a much wider audience, thanks to television. In 1981 the BBC aired a four-part mini-series very faithfully and skilfully adapted by Christopher Hampton. It proved to be a landmark in British TV drama, and made a little-known young actor called Antony Sher a star in the leading role, but it was received in a political climate very different from when the novel was written and published. Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives had won the General Election of 1979, and embarked on a political programme which sought to reverse everything the Kirks and their friends stood for. The radical Right was now in the ascendant, and its pundits welcomed The History Man as a confirmation that left-wing academics were corrupting the minds of the young. The universities were subjected to savage cuts in public funding in the 1980s, and sociology in particular fell into disfavour.

A writer in Prospect magazine in January 1999 traced the decline of sociology as an academic subject back to The History Man. In short, Malcolm Bradbury's critique of left-wing radicalism from a liberal humanist position was appropriated and vulgarised by right-wing radicalism. Bradbury himself deplored and disowned this application of his story, and the producers of the television serial, as if nervously anticipating such a reaction, appended a footnote to the credits at the end of the last episode: "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in the General Election of 1979", though this seems highly improbable. The meanings of fictions cannot be so easily revised or controlled.

It is hard to disentangle the reception of the novel from the reception of the television version, but one good effect of the latter was to prompt many more people to read the former, and to establish it firmly as a modern classic. The counterculture radicalism which the novel anatomised is now itself history, as is (in Britain at least) the right-wing radicalism which superseded it. But today there are new forms of radicalism, fundamentalisms of various kinds, and The History Man is still relevant, warning of what can happen when, in the words of WB Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."

Published by David Lodge

The Guardian, Saturday January 12 2008

http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/jan/12/fiction1

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