'If Your Books Are Funny, Please Tell Me
Where'
One of the letters I regularly receive in my large daily post is something I
have come to call the Wissenschaft letter. It comes
with a foreign stamp and can be from a university in Germany, France, Italy, Spain,
Denmark or Greece - any one of the European countries where they study
contemporary literature in a decidedly energetic and theoretical sort of way.
There are a lot of letters in my Wissenschaft file,
but most of them, excusing a pardonable exaggeration or two, tend to run
something like this:
Dear Herr Doktor Professor Bradburg,
Excuse please that I address you so, but I think in your
country you do not mind such informality. My name is Hans-Joachim Wissenschaft, and I am advanced student in Anglisten-Studien at Liebfraumilch
University, with nice manners, rimless glasses and a small moustache. I have
already passed the examens for my Arbeitsnachtrichen,
my Fernspreche and my Hinauslehnen
mit Pradikat, and I also
have good competences in Philologik, Linguistik, Pedagogik, Psycho-Analytik and Aerobik. Now I must
write my thesis for my Habitat. Always I love very much your Englisch litteraturs, ever since
as a boy I made holiday in Grimsby and came to relish the distinct flavors of
your country. My favorite authors are E. Waugh, A. Huxley and M. Python and
always I hoped to make a thesis of their works. Unfortunately, this is not
possible because my famous professor, Frau Doktor
Professor Brunehilde Zwischenprufung
(who tells you know her very well), likes it better that I write rather on the
''campus-novel,'' called also the ''university-novel,'' which is much studied
in my country. I do not find this so easy because the subject does not interest
me very much. But of course I take her advices, because as you know she is a
very big lady and one day she likes to write a very big book on this subject. I
think you will please to know I intend to make a special concentrate of your
works!
What I like is to take your ''campus-novels,'' ''Forbidden to
Eat People,'' ''Step to the West'' and ''Der Geschichtsmensch,'' and compare them with the works of your
better competitors - as, Thom. Hardy, Max Beerbohm, J. I. M. Stewart, Thom.
Sharpe, King. Amis, Howard Jacobson and David Lodge. I
write to you with the urgence of Professor Zwischenprufung, who tells that once you met together in
Hamburg in a very exciting congress, which was greatly enjoyed by all present.
Now she sends you her very best greeting, likes to remind you what a small
world it is, and also that she lended you a small
black folded umbrella that she now likes very much to have back, as it is
raining here.
Please give all the helps you can, for certain things of your
writings cause here a confusion. Perhaps you do not
know it yet, but this type ''the campus-novel'' does not really exist in
Germany, I think because all our professors are very great scholars who write
only very serious books and have no need of such strange publications. For us
''campus-novel'' is a very peculiar praxis, found only in Britain and small
bits of the United States. Explain me this please. I know your professors are
not so well paid and must find other ways to survive. Yet this does not explain
the representations of universities in these novels, which seem always wicked
and dishonest. Does perhaps your government pay you to write these books to
stop students attending your universities now that with economic crisis you
have no more places for them? I have also been told that many of these novels
are in the tradition of humoristic satire, but I do not think it is so. I do
not understand how it is possible to make humor about a university.
Please give me a very full answer to these questions so I can
write an excellent thesis. I would like an explanation of the history, ontology
and esthetik of the ''campus-novel,'' also full
bibliography. I like you to interpret the representation of university life in
these novels from the standpoint of Landeskunde and
explain me, from the standpoint of Reception-theorie,
who likes to read them and why so. If your books are funny, please tell me
where, and send me your ontology of the comedic and your theoretiks
of the humoristic and how you like to compare yourself with Aristotle,
Nietzsche and Freud. Only one more question now! My professor hints me that you
and David Lodge are the same person. Perhaps you are also T. Hardy, M.
Beerbohm, T. Sharpe and H. Jacobson. If so please tell me in your letter and
give me a full bibliography of your writings under all your names. Also please
send a cassette of Supertramp, ''Breakfast in
America,'' which is not so easy here to obtain. Hans-Joachim Wissenschaft
Naturally, since I get so many letters of that kind, I have
worked out a reply that is rather of this kind:
My dear Herr Wissenschaft, Thank you
so much for your letter. What a pleasure it is to hear again of Professor Z.,
all of whom I remember with vivid clarity. Please give her my warmest and most
affectionate good wishes. Naturally I am delighted to help to the best of my
abilities. You will be happy to learn that, owing to the sudden cancellation of
a 10-part television series I was writing, I suddenly have several weeks to
spare. So, out of my great attachment to your excellent mentor, I shall try to
confront the many cogent points raised in your missive, or missile, as best I
can. I do not want to seem discouraging to someone as evidently diligent as
yourself, but I have to tell you that the phrase ''campus novel'' causes me
some anxiety and has even brought me out in large red blemishes. It is said, I
think, that Thomas Mann had similar problems when people described his ''Zauberberg'' - or ''The Magic Flute,'' as we call it here -
as a ''hospital novel,'' and that Franz Kafka turned into something totally
different from his so-called normal self when he was asked to compare his work
in the field of the ''castle novel'' with that of P. G. Wodehouse. Of course no
one is more in favor of theories of genre than myself,
so I will explain my antipathy with a personal anecdote.
My difficulties with the term ''university novel'' began in
early life, when I published my first book - which I like to call ''Eating
People Is Wrong,'' though this clearly is up for argument. It so happened that
I published the book, took my first academic job and married my first and only
wife all in the same week; but we all have difficult weeks from time to time.
No sooner was the book out than my publisher, Fredric Warburg, summoned me to
London to discuss my future. Drunk with expectations of literary fame, I and my
new wife hastened to satisfy him. We lived in the north, and my wife had never
been knowingly south of the River Trent in her life. Nonetheless she made a
week's supply of sandwiches, in case they did not have food in London, and we
took the train to the great metropolis. We arrived at St. Pancras
Station, where my wife, mistaking it for St. Paul's Cathedral, knelt in the
left-luggage office and offered prayers for our safe return.
Warburg's office was at the very top of one of those charming
Georgian houses in Bloomsbury without which the British publishing industry
could not exist. And he made an impressive figure as he stood, infinitely tall
and in a white suit, at the top of the stairs and ushered us into the lavatory,
perhaps thinking that this was what we had come to London for. ''This is your
author, come to see you,'' said my wife. Warburg bent graciously, kissed her
hand and led us into a vast white room with a great white desk. It had one
chair opposite and in this he seated my wife, gesturing me to a stool in a
far-distant corner. For an hour or so my wife and publisher had an extended,
warm conversation, she blushing prettily when he rose now and then to kiss her
hand again or make her more comfortable in her chair. From time to time they
waved at me. Then Warburg rose suddenly, and we were out in the street again.
''What did he want to say to me?'' I asked my wife anxiously. ''Oh, well,'' she
said, stopping a passing Rolls-Royce and telling it to take us to the station,
''he just wanted to make absolutely sure you didn't write any more university
novels.''
Frankly, it was only now that I learned my book was a
university novel. Admittedly it was set in the academic groves, but since I had
spent my entire life in educational institutions, from kindergarten to graduate
school (I fancy you will know the feeling, Herr Wissenschaft),
I naturally assumed that trotting off to class or the library every day was
normality itself. Everyone gave lectures to everyone else; life was books, and
books were life. So Warburg's warning came to me as a terrible shock. What was
worse, I was already on the last lap of another novel - set on the, well,
campus of an American, well, university. Back home again, I picked up the
unfortunate manuscript and assaulted it desperately, trying all I could to
alter the location - to a factory, a prison, the forecourt of a garage,
anywhere but where it was. But despite all the grime, hard labor and street
brutality I tried to smear over my characters, I simply could not prevent them
from discussing things like epistemology and the liberal dilemma. I labored for
years to hide my crime, until one day the manuscript suddenly disappeared,
along with my wife. For days I wondered where it had gone, and sometimes I
missed her, too. Happily it - and she - returned some days later; she had
delivered the very first draft to Warburg, who had been delighted to see her
and, for that matter, the book. In fact, if she was to be believed, it was just
what he had always wanted. Apparently he now wanted me to write yet another
university novel. ''I knew you'd be pleased,'' said my wife, gripping her
checkbook and riffling through all the torn-off stubs.
I was not. Taking my publisher's earlier warning to heart, I
had already set my next book entirely at the bottom of a mineshaft - which,
incidentally, is quite different from a Gemeinschaft.
If you have a course in colliery fiction I might be able to dredge it up from
the lake where I threw it when I had this news. But, always one to follow the
whims of a wise publisher's advice, I now sat down and invented a fiction
partly set in a new university during the student revolts of the 1960's.
By the time it, too, was successfully published, I had grown
in cunning and deviousness. I set my next novel, ''Wechsel,''
in an imaginary Eastern European country called Slaka.
Among the generally warm reviews, several suggested that my imaginary country
was not utterly like Eastern Europe, but remarkably like a university. I suffer
through these harrowing experiences again because from them I learned a few
lessons. One is that publishers, and the publics they speak for, like genres or
subgenres even more than we critics do, so that they can tell what they are
marketing or buying. Another lesson is that therefore, once a writer is known
for one thing, it is almost impossible to do anything else, even if you do. It
is with genres as with sports cars; once inside one, you will never get out of
it again - except perhaps by death or the taking of a pseudonym, whichever is
easier.
I must acknowledge that the ''university novel'' does show
some signs of being a commonplace form, especially in Britain - perhaps because
the British novel has always been about places that are rather difficult to get
into. We can even trace a history of sorts, back to the sentimental Oxbridge
romances of the 19th century, which you can, and doubtless will, compare with
''Wilhelm Meister'' and the Bildungsroman. These are
tales about young men's education in pastoral surroundings, part of an Oxbridge
myth that grows a mite more ironic in the 20th-century novels of Forster, Waugh
and Aldous Huxley. Perhaps what made the story more
interesting was when it crossed over with the fiction of the academically
excluded, like Hardy's ''Jude the Obsure'' and the
novels of D. H. Lawrence. Certainly it was after the Butler Education Act of
1944, which admitted cartloads of pimply social refugees to various academic
destinations, that the whole affair took on pace. Many of the new books were
set not in glowing Oxbridge but in ''redbrick'' universities -which are
frequently converted lunatic asylums or extended public lavatories - and, in
time, the ''new'' universities, 1960's architectural wonders built in green
fields by Finnish architects driven mad by the remarkable plastic properties of
concrete. You may possibly find some trace of all this in my own works. Since
then the university novel, like universities themselves, appeared to undergo a
period of expansion. In fact the books began to acquire what you and I would call
''intertextuality,'' which of course is quite
different from plagiarism.
But, as you rightly ask, why should this very peculiar
practice have grown to such proportions? In the many boxes of scholarly
apparatus I am shipping to you by separate sea-container, you will find various
professors' attempts to answer just this question. Study, for
example, the article by P. R. Elkin, a fine scholar who sees the university
novel as a kind of campus epidemic, rather like glandular fever or genital
herpes. Throughout the Anglo-Saxon world, he asserts, ''every kind of
person connected with universities appears to have tried his hand at writing
them,'' be they college don or campus porter. The main reason, he seems to
suspect, is that people in academic life have an excess of leisure time, and no
doubt get paper at discount prices as well.
I commend you, when you unpack the truck, to look up the two
fine articles on the campus novel by George Watson and Professor J. P. Kenyon.
Mr. Watson's piece will provide you with an excellent short history of our
genre: good, I'd say, for at least 10 footnotes. But he then comments that ''he
has several reasons, all partly selfish, for hoping that Anglo-American campus
fiction will fade away and die'' - not a view he takes, I believe, of epic
poetry, for example. (He does explain, a little surprisingly, that he thinks it
hard for universities to have to do their excellent work in what he calls ''the
blaze of glamorizing publicity.'') I will leave it to you, Herr Wissenschaft, to judge just why it is that university
critics do not always like university novels and even sometimes upset their
entire critical theories when they discuss them. Actually I suspect I know the
answer, which may have something to do with another word you use in your
capacious inquiry: the word ''satire.'' And now I fear I am going to disappoint
you severely, Herr Wissenschaft. For, to be frank,
campus novels are quite heavily infested with satirical intentions, humoristic
practices and the like. In fact, to be entirely open with you, they are comic
novels, and certain pages here and there are intended to produce a
physiological comic reflex, which in Britain we call laughter. I understand
entirely why this should produce anxiety, not least among my academic colleagues.
For it is true that if universities - communities of largely good, decent,
brilliant, enlightened people, committed to the best of ends, such as the
survival of humanism and the differentiation between B+ and B++ - can be
subjected to satire, then what cannot be done to all the rest of life, which is
so very much worse?
So it is very proper of you to ask me about my ontology of the
comic and my theoretic of the humanistic, and I wish I could answer you.
Unfortunately this is a matter I usually leave others to discuss, while I sit
in the bar with a few close friends. My relationship with Aristotle, Nietzsche
and Freud has been for some time a vexed question, and my lawyer advises me it
could well be subject to litigation. So I will comment only briefly. As I
understand it, Aristotle never completed his work on comedy. He did, however,
argue that comedy is an inverted tragedy, or a tragedy
written upside down; and this is exactly the way I have always tried to write
my books. On the matter of Nietzsche, I have, to be frank, tried to avoid him
as much as possible, and I believe he has taken the same attitude toward me. As
I understand it, Nietzsche's theory, while admirable, applies effectively only
to Wagner's ''Ring'' cycle, which only King Ludwig of Bavaria seems to have
found a load of laughs. I have learned a good deal from Freud on many matters,
but perhaps least in the realm of wit and the comic, which he sees as a
manifestation of the unconscious, something we do not have in my country. But I
am most inclined to set my own work in the tradition of the modern British
comic novel, which as we all know started with James Joyce's ''Ulysses,'' but
has improved since.
I hope all this puts you straight about university and campus
fiction. Happily, there are some writers who transcend or transform the genre
in which they write, and I congratulate you on having chosen one. I trust that
all I have said will prove useful material for your thesis. I advise you to
incorporate as much of it as possible, if only for what Mr. Watson calls
''several reasons, all partly selfish.'' That would give me the chance to
acquire yet another pseudonym, not something I reject lightly, as you have so
cunningly surmised.
It was clever of you to work out that in fact I am several if
not all of the authors you mention. To be frank, this is something I have been
trying to conceal for many years, not wanting to overcrowd the market. But -
strictly on the condition that this information is divulged to no one
whatsoever, but is safely buried in your thesis, which will, I take it, shortly
be locked up in an obscure university library and be securely protected by the
unbreakable code of academic language - I am prepared to acknowledge to you and
you alone the versatility and complexity of my literary achievement, as well as
the fact that, although my wife and family believe me to be quite young, I have
been writing steadfastly and productively ever since the mid-19th century. In
all honesty, it has been a difficult business, especially the episode of being
married to Mrs. Thomas Hardy. But now that theses like your own are being
written and all the pieces put together, it has been worth it.
Again, please give your excellent professor my good wishes and
tell her it was not I but David Lodge who went off with her umbrella. Also say
that either or both of us remember our solemn undertaking never to include her
in any work of fiction; we will continue to respect it. And
very good luck with the Habitat. Yours sincerely, Max Beerbohm Adapted
from ''Unsent Letters: Irreverent Notes From a
Literary Life'' by Malcolm Bradbury, to be published this month by Viking.
Published in July 17, 1988
By Malcolm Bradbury
On The New York Times On The Web
Copyright
1998 The New York Times Company
http://www.nytimes.com/books/01/04/01/specials/bradbury-funny.html
Other interesting
articles written by Bradbury: [Next] [1] [2]
[3]
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