How Malcolm Bradbury killed sociology
Malcolm Bradbury
wrote prodigiously, shaped new generations of writers at UEA and even sounded
the death-knell for a whole academic discipline with his most famous novel,
'The History Man'. Tom Rosenthal remembers his wit, his
gentleness - and his pipe.
On my mantelpiece I have a photograph of
David Jason in full academic fig as Scullion, the Head Porter become Master of
Porterhouse, in the TV adaptation of Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue. Not because
I am that pathetic figure, an obsessive fan; it's there because among the
dinner-jacketed and gowned Porterhouse undergraduates behind him in the College
Dining Hall are to be seen my older son and Malcolm Bradbury's younger son, Dominic,
employed as extras. Malcolm Bradbury is not there; but he is the guiding
spirit, the "onlie begetter" of what has
become a favourite family snapshot. For Malcolm was
not only a superb novelist and TV scriptwriter, who could take the most
apparently intractable material and turn it into immaculately crafted TV drama
but also, in English cultural terms, a superlative, but always benevolent
fixer.
Bradbury was for 25 years a much respected Professor of
American Studies at the University of East Anglia. He also founded, with Angus
Wilson, the UEA Creative Writing Programme and his
pupils included Ian McEwan, Kazuo Ishiguro, Rose Tremain
and others whose successful careers he helped to shape and establish. He
published much impeccable academic criticism and wrote several superb novels, rangingfrom Eating People is Wrong to The History Man, and
ending with that amazing mixture of historical invention and robust modern
comedy, To the Hermitage, which was published in 2000, the year of both his
knighthood and his death.
He was a devoted family man, a keen smoker and someone who
could consume heroic quantities of alcohol in the course of endlessly sociable
and happy evenings while remaining perfectly sober and articulate; all this in
a man who had had heart trouble in his youth. In addition, he was a dedicated traveller to conferences all over the world and, via the
British Council, a benign ambassador for English culture in the best possible
way, since he was a model of amiability and charm. He nonetheless thoroughly
deserved the graffito on one of the gents lavatory
walls at UEA, "What is the difference between God and Professor Bradbury?
God is everywhere: Professor Bradbury is everywhere but here."
In one of his "not here" phases,
Malcolm arranged for various friends to be invited, in 1987, to something
called, rather pretentiously, the World Affairs Conference at the University of
Boulder, Colorado. Malcolm's gang included his fellow UEA professor and
American expert, Christopher Bigsby, the poet Anthony
Thwaite, and me, and we were all expected to lead the
open seminars attended by Boulder's town and gown populations. One morning
Malcolm and I shared a platform and, since both of us thought more
constructively while smoking pipes, lit up. This was before the nationwide
American witch-hunting hysteria about smoking had properly taken root.
Nonetheless the lecture room had a couple of No Smoking notices and, within
seconds, several old miseries started shrieking at us to stop. Malcolm, a much
gentler person than me, paused in mid puff and said nothing. I on the other
hand remarked that while we much appreciated the campus's hospitality, we had
(a) paid our own fares to fly 5000 miles and (b) were not being paid to speak
for several hours each day, and if our talk was of any value at all it was
because a bit of tranquil pipe-smoking aided our fluency and we intended to go
on talking and smoking. A few years later I retold this story, much
embellished, when making a speech at The Savoy as Malcolm was crowned Pipe Smoker
of the Year.
Being Malcolm's friend was easy; being his publisher was more
complicated since he was, and will primarily be remembered as, a novelist and,
if you regard the novel as the most important literary form, a tally of only
six between 1959 and 2000 seems slow, even niggardly. Yet you couldn't think of
Malcolm as lazy. He produced lit crit, short stories,
anthologies, collections of essays, plays, original
screenplays for television and many TV adaptations of others' work. There was a
notable Cold Comfort Farm and episodes of Inspector Morse, A Touch of Frost, Kavanagh QC etc.
It's one of the central paradoxes of Bradbury's literary
career that, as an academic, he fulfilled his duties to students and colleagues
in the form of departmental responsibility, lectures, seminars and orthodox
critical writing. Yet, in the best of his creative work, while not exactly
biting the hand that fed him, he, to put it mildly, mocked the foibles and
follies he could hardly avoid observing in his daily working life.
For Malcolm the two impostors were not Triumph and Disaster
but Structuralism and Deconstruction, with, perhaps as third impostor,
Sociology. This was mercilessly dissected in The History Man, in which the
corrupt and corrupting Howard Kirk (who was not Laurie Taylor) so memorably
portrayed by Anthony Sher in the TV version, causes
such sexual and intellectual havoc.
Dominic Bradbury has edited a new collection of pieces by his
father, Liar's Landscape: collected writing from a storyteller's life (Picador £20).
It contains a short essay entitled, "Welcome Back to the History
Man", in which Malcolm responded to Ian Christie's assertion in Prospect
that The History Man was the turning point in the decline of sociology as an
academic discipline. According to Christie, "Bradbury's demolition of his
anti-hero's hypocrises and pretensions was hailed as
though he headed up an army relieving a city besieged by Marxist
academics." Malcolm retorts: "In fact I had no armies, and even I
don't believe novels make that kind of difference." He goes on to express
a genuine respect for sociology and, though he saw Kirk as "a rogue of
rogues", envisages him, at the end of the essay, "enjoying his
vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside
University, and the life peerage would be a source of the greatest
pleasure".
One of Malcolm's best books, in which he exposed the idiocies
of structuralism and deconstruction was Mensonge, a quest for the life and character of that giant
of contemporary French intellectual life, Henri Mensonge.
As mensonge means lie the search is perforce useless,
but as a cod piece of academic research it is unrivalled. The frontispiece,
believed to be the only extant photograph of Mensonge,
is taken by - and credited to - me and consists of the back of my head, an
effect achieved by sitting backwards on the stool in the photo booth at Swiss
Cottage tube station.
My other favourite of the non-novel
books is Unsent Letters, from which Dominic Bradbury has here reprinted
"The Wissenschaft File" in which Malcolm
creates in the excruciatingly laboured prose of a
German postgraduate student with a very shaky command of English, a
solicitation of Professor Bradburg's (sic) help in
writing a thesis on the Prof's oeuvre. To this Malcolm appends his sumptuously
evasive reply in which he deals with "the vexed issue" of whether
there is a competent writer of English campus novels known as Bodge, a topic also entertainingly dealt with by David
Lodge in the Afterword.
The two longest sections of this cornucopia of a book are a hybrid
novella and television script and the substantial beginning of what would have
been a major novel. The hybrid will delight all who enjoyed Malcolm's deadly TV
assassination of Brussels and the Common Market, The Gravy Train. The script
for Furling the Flag was completed but, unaccountably,
not made into a film. It does for the handover of Hong Kong what The Gravy
Train did for Brussels, is mordantly funny and plotted by a master-craftsman of
the genre. When the project was axed Malcolm was going to turn it into a
novella but did not live to complete it. So what we get is the beginning as a
novella and the rest of the story as a TV script. This odd mixture actually
works and is so funny that you can only assume that the broadcasters got cold
feet about the subject matter. A pity.
The other major piece provides the book's title. "Liar's
Landscape" is part exploration of American history and part biographical
fiction about Chateaubriand, who, when living in Suffolk, impregnated a
clergyman's daughter and failed to marry her. While in Bungay
he also wrote his bestselling novel Atala, in the
house now lived in by Elizabeth Jane Howard which Malcolm had often visited.
This section ends tantalisingly with the unfinished
sentence: "I decided to go to Paris, enjoy my rank, and become a
philosopher..." Its Shandyesque digressions and
time-shifts and games played with the event of Chateaubriand's birth are full
of the ludic spirit that haunts all of Bradbury's
best work and, on the limited evidence printed in this otherwise immensely
satisfying book, makes it clear that it would have been a perfect companion to,
and successor of, the strangely underrated To the Hermitage.
Most Afterwords to collections like
this are either full of academic jargon or are merely perfunctory. This one, by
David Lodge, his almost exact contemporary, colleague and genuinely friendly
rival in the stakes to be England's foremost campus novelist - in my view a
dead heat - is a model of what such an essay should be. It is itself witty and
informative but, above all, a warm tribute from one literary craftsman to
another and as such an elegant counterpart and complement to the editor Dominic
Bradbury's justified filial admiration and pride.
Liar's Landscape is essential reading for
all admirers of Malcolm Bradbury and, for those who don't know his work, an
invaluable sampler of his worldly-wise humour and his
satirical wit, which, with deceptive gentleness, actually bites very deep. At
his best - and there is much of his best in this book - he is that rare beast,
a jack of many literary trades who mastered them all.
Published in Sunday, 5
February 2006
Copyright
2008 Independent News and Media Limited
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