British
Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millennium
At
the Gates of Commonsense – Malcolm Bradbury (1932-2000)
Malcolm
Bradbury begins as an ironist, for whom mocking fiction is the target, while
the plot of the soul, the intricacies of character and the sophistication of
psychological analysis lag way behind. His first two novels, Eating People Is
Wrong (1959) and Stepping Westward (1965) make fun of universities
(particularly academics in the English Department) and the occasional writers
they invite, who almost always put their foot in it. Literature and the
academic background seem to be incompatible in Bradbury’s humour.
The novelist
confesses:
‘Like most comic
novelists, I take the novel extremely seriously. It is the best of all forms –
open and personal, intelligent and enquiring. I value it for its scepticism,
its irony, and its play. My novels are all forays into various kinds of
comedy...’
Eating People Is
Wrong is ‘a comedy,’ too, as the author announces from the very first page. It
is a mass of comic remarks and incidents, indeed. A provincial university, with
a Department of English whose head is Professor Stuart Treece, imparts the joys
of literature to a bunch of unlikable individuals – but we must not go farther
than that, since, the title warns us, ‘eating people is wrong.’ Malcolm
Bradbury just munches them a little, then spreads them on the page like a
doubtfully amusing (or nourishing) paste.
Among the
characters there is twenty-six-year-old Louis Bates, a ‘self-made’ student,
whose father ‘was a railway man.’ He comes for education to a university
college whose building was formerly the town lunatic asylum, grown ‘too small
to accommodate those unable to stand up to the rigours of the new world.’
Louis Bates (as
we learn in the end) was the inmate of a mental hospital before, and he ends by
attempting suicide and going to another. During the interval in between, he
studies in a building which ‘became an asylum of another kind.’ As Bradbury
muses, ‘great wits are thus to madness near allied.’ The windows of this
college still have bars over the windows and there is nowhere you can hang
yourself, although Treece constantly feels on the edge of doing just that. He
has a meaningless affair with his fellow, Dr. Viola Masefield, and, though he
is forty, he has another one with his twenty-six-year-old post-graduate student
Emma Fielding. Neither means much to him, or he is (Bradbury is?) unable to
reveal any emotion at all. Stripped naked of all humanity, Stuart Treece roams
aimlessly towards the last page like the caricature of a despondent Don
Quixote, who has been deprived of his windmills and feels useless and used.
Not unlike Oscar
Wilde, Malcolm Bradbury focuses on humorous sentences more than on human
beings. A sociologist called Jenkins returns from a Chicago University, where
he had a Rockefeller scholarship, with the thought: ‘...soon it won’t be
necessary for us to go to America. It will all be here.’
The black son of
a tribe chief in West Africa is called Eborebelosa, and declares himself
prisoner ‘in the toilet’ when we first hear of him. We never get to know much
about him, or about anyone for that matter, anyway. The truth of the matter is
much fiercer: Eborebelosa was sent over to be educated at the expense of ‘a
terrorist society devoted to driving out the British.’ Treece, we are told,
‘was quite prepared to help Mr. Eborebelosa be a terrorist, if that really was
his fulfilment,’ but the latter kept hiding in the lavatories. On top of these
two heavy pieces of ammunition, Eborebelosa also falls in love with Emma, who –
far from black terrorism – is writing a thesis on ‘the fish imagery in
Shakespeare’s tragedies.’
Another instance
of witticism is the dialogue between a Herr Schumann (who has come from Germany
to study English language and literature) and a nun. The nun tells him
‘pleasantly’:
‘It is very good
of you to come to England, of course, since you were fighting it only a few
years ago. It is very civilized of all of us to forget this so easily. I think
we are all very developed persons.’
The words were
uttered in the 1950s, when the plot takes place. It is the period when people
were beginning to take driving tests, so Treece failed his, although he was
just driving a bicycle with a small engine attached to it.
Bradbury seems
to be fascinated by the iron curtain. He always has at least one character
fleeing from communism. It is Tanya, in this book. She is a lecturer in
Slavonic languages, she is ‘of Russian stock’ and also possibly a lesbian, who
has taken Viola ‘under her wing.’ She is not described at length, but then, no
characters is. Malcolm Bradbury hardly touches the shell of his heroes and
withdraws in awe. And we soon understand why. Each of them has a terrible skeleton
in the cupboard. Some unconfessed abnormality. Louis Bates his madness, Treece
his inability to feel, and Emma suspects herself of ‘eating people,’ thus
explaining (rather feebly) the title of the novel:
‘...Emma
collected people. When, a little time ago, a song came out with the line
‘Eating people is wrong,’ Emma felt a twinge of conscience; she agreed with the
proposition, but was not sure that she exactly lived up to it.’
The reader
himself would be tempted to eat Bradbury’s people if there were any available,
but the author (deliberately?) starves his visitors.
The novel is a
small, confusing world devoid of any rules. It is just as the German student
Herr Schumann puts it, in an Oscar Wilde-like statement:
‘I like the
English. They have the most rigid code of immorality in the world.’
Louis Bates, for
instance, is also confused in the Wildean manner. He falls in love (he thinks)
with Emma, who does not want him, so the author concludes:
‘...sometimes
the opposite sex were just too opposite for him.’
Literature
itself is described as bewildering, pointless, narcissistic:
‘...nowadays all
the novels you seem to get are about what’s wrong with other novels.’
Bradbury’s novel
is indeed a kind of tacit argument with other manners of writing. Like all contemporary
Desperadoes, although he conceals the attempt, he hopes to found his own,
inimitable trend. He is entertaining to a point, then falls short of getting
serious, which, we feel, he would very much like. When Treece tries to take a
trip into his own inner world, it sounds wildly, though unwillingly, comical:
‘He knew that he
always expected too much and would never be satisfied in this human world.’
Peter Ackroyd is
entrancing. Bradbury may wish to grip the reader’s imagination in his first two
novels, but he fails to do so. There may be too much self-awareness in what he
writes. He is a writer who wants to forget he is writing and create out of
instinct, but sophistication stands in his way. Actually the whole book seems
to prepare the arrival of the young novelist Willoughby for a short visit. Here
is how Treece, who puts him up, introduces him to the Department and students:
‘Ladies and
gentlemen,’ he said, we’re delighted to have with us Mr. Carey Willoughby, who
needs no introduction from me. He is one of the so-called novelists of the new
movement – I mean one of the novelists of the so-called new movement...’
Everyone in the
book, after two hundred pages of nothing happening, seems to be ready for a
revelation. If we can’t have lives, emotions, a plot, then at least the
intricacies of tricky writing, reflections on new texts might do. But
Willoughby refuses the invitation. ‘There is no movement,’ he declares. Treece
feels as betrayed as we do. Nothing new to talk about? No trip into new
techniques, new views? He attacks Willoughby with a question that is meant to
threaten all Desperadoes:
‘...do you write
more than you read or read more than you write?’
Willoughby
blushes and the author in him whimpers:
‘You have no
friends in this game. In this game you just have to have merit. And I never did
have much of that.’
The reason may
be, as he later states, that he tries to write about ‘life and how it’s lived,’
but ends up recording ‘why it can’t be lived properly any more.’ Deficient
lives, deficient texts, and authors in disarray. It would be interesting to
know whether Willoughby speaks for Bradbury as well, when he concludes that his
novels have no ‘proper endings’ because
‘I’m not trying
to butter up my public,’ said Willoughby. ‘With my sort of book there’s no
resolution because there’s no solution. The problems aren’t answered in the end
because there is no answer. They’re problems that are handed on to the reader,
not solved for him, so that he can go away thinking he lives in a beautiful
world. It’s not a beautiful world.’
As if to prove
the truth of this belief, Treece falls ill, goes to hospital, is visited
fleetingly by Emma, then
‘She went away,
and he lay there in his bed, and felt as though this would be his condition for
evermore, and that from this he would never, never escape.’
Nobody is
involved with anyone else, and nothing leads to anything. Suspense is killed.
Bradbury tries to write as uneventfully as he breathes, and we follow him
empty-hearted, stripped of all expectations. The uneventful text falls like a
veil. We cannot see the outline of literature because of it.
Published in British
Literary Desperadoes at the Turn of the Millennium, ALL Publishing House,
Bucharest, 1999
http://lidiavianu.scriptmania.com/malcolm_bradbury.htm
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