Obituary: Professor Sir Malcolm Bradbury

THE NOVELIST, critic and television scriptwriter Malcolm Bradbury spent almost 50 years in universities at home and abroad. In the course of his career as Professor of American Studies at the University of East Anglia from 1970 until 1994, he was a visiting academic and a regular at conferences in universities across the world. He used this experience of academia in novels such as The History Man (1975), his mordant satire on university radicalism in the Seventies - along with David Lodge, he was largely responsible for making "the campus novel" into a distinct literary genre.

Born in Sheffield in 1932, Bradbury spent his earliest years in London when his father, Arthur Bradbury, got a job involved with print and design with the London and North East Railway at Liverpool Street Station. The typographer and sculptor Eric Gill was among the contractors his father commissioned.

At the start of the Second World War the Bradburys were living in Rayners Lane, north-west London, but, since nearby Northolt and Heathrow airports were bombing targets, Malcolm was evacuated to the silk-weaving centre of Macclesfield in Cheshire to live with his grandparents. There had been Bradburys in Macclesfield for five generations working as private coal- miners who dug their own pits on their own land. His grandmother, however, had been a silk weaver from the age of seven: when she had Arthur, the baby slept in a basket under a loom.

Bradbury's grandparents were Methodists. His grandfather was a lay preacher and Sunday-school teacher - Macclesfield had the biggest Sunday school in Britain at the time. He recalled in later years: "It was a very religious household, very Victorian in atmosphere. I was rather frightened of my grandparents." He was also lonely and missing his mother and father. His solace was reading. He was a frail child, constantly sick and that too made him bookish. His grandparents had a good collection of popular Victorian literature and he read avidly.

In 1943, aged 11, he went to West Bridgford Grammar School in Nottingham. He was forbidden sports but excelled at his studies and in 1950 went on to University College, Leicester. He wrote later:

My father and his generation had made some progress but, nevertheless, he had left school at 16 and my mother at 14. After the war, with the Butler Education Act and grammar schools, I had access to social promotion in a big way. I was the first generation at grammar school and the first at university. It was a very exciting experience; it was social pioneering and that made it worth writing about.

So write about it he did. He began his first novel whilst still an undergraduate. He got a first class degree in English Literature in 1953 and moved to Queen Mary College, London, to do his MA. He then spent a formative year as the English-Speaking Union Fellow at Indiana University, Bloomington before taking his PhD back at Manchester University.

A heart problem was the cause of his frailty and he had been advised by specialists that he would not live a long life. However, in 1958 Bradbury was admitted to hospital for an operation on his heart that, as reported in The Lancet, should extend his life at least into his fifties. He had already met his future wife, Elizabeth, an adaptor of literary classics for radio. She visited him devotedly during his time in hospital. They married in 1959, the same year that his debut novel, Eating People Is Wrong, was published.

Bradbury's hero in the novel is Treece, a redbrick university professor adrift in a liberal academe. It is a comic work - campus novels as a genre are - and it earned him comparisons with Kingsley Amis, who had in a sense launched the campus novel with Lucky Jim five years before. By now Bradbury was a junior lecturer at Hull University but in 1961 he moved to Birmingham University as Lecturer in English, a position he held until 1965. Whilst there he wrote, with David Lodge and Jim Duckett, two satirical revues for the Birmingham Rep. He learned the hard way at least one lesson in staging plays: always provide your own background music. For one of the sketches the music was provided by a radio tuned to the BBC. One night in November 1963 the music was interrupted with news of the assassination of President Kennedy, an announcement that did for the sketch.

During the Sixties he produced several critical works, including in 1962 a study of Evelyn Waugh. His second novel, Stepping Westward, came out in 1965, the year he made his move to the new University of East Anglia (UEA).

In Stepping Westward James Walker, a vacillating writer bracketed with the Angry Young Men, goes to a midwestern university as visiting academic. There his woolly liberalism clashes with a form more concerned with hard politics. Liberalism under threat was a theme of Bradbury's novels - on the whole he saw the academic world in terms of decency, goodwill and humanism. Bradbury followed Walker's example in 1966 when he taught at the University of California for a year.

On his return he resumed his teaching at East Anglia. He had gone to UEA in large part because of Angus Wilson, who was Professor of English there and had at the time a very high reputation as a novelist. Over 30 years later, Bradbury was shaken to discover in Margaret Drabble's biography of Wilson that the older writer didn't like him very much. Bradbury told one interviewer:

He [Wilson] rather feared this young novelist encroaching on his place, and was extremely worried about what I would write. It was quite shattering to read how he'd been rendered anxious by my presence.

Nevertheless, Wilson and Bradbury worked together to set up the first creative writing course at a university in the UK, based on successful American models. In 1970, the same year that Bradbury became Professor of American Studies, the first postgraduate writing course began. Initially it had no takers but at the last moment one student applied, Ian McEwan. In 1970 he was Bradbury's only student. Since then 200 would-be writers have taken the course. Many have gone on to work in publishing or journalism and more than 40 have been published, including, aside from McEwan, such writers as Louise Doughty, Rose Tremain, Clive Sinclair and Kazuo Ishiguro.

Bradbury was old-fashioned in his teaching of creative writing, opposing the view that "self-expression matters more than how you say things". "I think," he said, "people should imbibe and ingest a decent literary education in order to write well." He had "a great deal of sympathy" with those who said that the best writers make it on their own but he felt it was important that these would-be writers had a support system to match that of the Oxbridge mafia. "I am redbrick through and through," he said later. "Writers from Oxford and Cambridge did seem to have a peculiar advantage of access, and friendship."

Bradbury, teaching the works of great contemporary American authors, was conscious of the "provincialism of much of British fiction". In The History Man, he began, he said, "to move away from provincial realism towards a sense of membership in a larger, more dangerous, contemporary world of writing". That novel had a harsher edge to its satire and was technically more experimental. Its central character, Howard Kirk, is a sociologist but also a "history man" who rejects humanism as old-fashioned and thinks he can change history - and individual lives. The History Man won the Royal Society of Literature Heinemann Prize and was a popular success in its television adaptation.

Bradbury began adapting other writers' works for television - including Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blue, Kingsley Amis's The Green Man and Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm - and his name on the credits over the next two decades became a guarantee of quality. He wrote two novels specifically for television: The Gravy Train (1990), which won a Monte Carlo Award, and The Gravy Train Goes East (1991).

From the mid-Seventies until he retired from East Anglia in the mid-Nineties, Bradbury's life was a mixture of teaching, foreign travel, and writing criticism, novels and TV adaptations. He had been Visiting Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford, in 1969 and a Visiting Professor in Zurich in 1972. In subsequent years he was also a Visiting Professor in the United States and Australia. And then there were the conferences. He once said:

I go to a lot of conferences. Some are amazingly boring, but, providing there are bright people and some good papers, I enjoy them. It is a good way to see the world, and it's the only world I enjoy seeing. I'm not keen on being a gawping tourist, I'd much rather be in a community of academics and historians.

Although he is usually categorised - alongside Lodge, Howard Jacobson and Tom Sharpe - as a "campus novelist", he (like them) moved away from the genre. His view in any case was that, although his first three novels were all set at universities, "any setting which allowed me to explore intelligent characters and intellectual and humanist issues would do as well". In 1976 he published a non- campus work, Who Do You Think You Are?, stories and parodies containing sharp pastiches of C.P. Snow, Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch, John Braine and Allan Sillitoe.

He set his next book, Rates of Exchange, in a fictitious hard- line Eastern European country. Published in 1982, the novel was short- listed for the Booker Prize. His 1986 work Why Come To Slaka? also considered European issues. He published Cuts: a very short novel in 1987, and Unsent Letters in 1988. His next novel, Doctor Criminale, published in 1992, a year after he had been appointed CBE, was a satirical look at the postmodern world centred around a politically influential PR adviser. In 1993, a conference on the French philosopher Denis Diderot inspired Bradbury to write To the Hermitage, an ambitious novel set in Russia, which was published in January this year to great acclaim.

In 1995, after 25 years of "building a nest of singing birds in flat, windblown East Anglia", he left his job at UEA. "Twenty-five years of living inside the work of other writers," he remarked, "is about as much as one skull can carry."

In the Nineties, by the time he retired from university life, he had already completed three non-fiction works - The Modern British Novel (1994), The Atlas of Literature (1996) and Dangerous Pilgrimages (1996) - in which he provided an overview of, and links between, literature in Britain, America and Europe. His own novels were satirical observations on the decades in which they were set: from the moral Fifties and the free Sixties to the radical Seventies and cold, self-interested Eighties. In form they moved from comedy to tragi-comedy.

Because of his heart problems, Malcolm Bradbury never expected to reach old age. Asked once how he would like to be remembered, he replied: "For my novels, and my work with young writers."

Malcolm Stanley Bradbury, writer, critic and scriptwriter: born Sheffield, Yorkshire 7 September 1932; Staff Tutor in Literature and Drama, Department of Adult Education, Hull University 1959-61; Lecturer in English Language and Literature, Birmingham University 1961-65; Lecturer (later Senior Lecturer and Reader) in English and American Literature, University of East Anglia 1965-70, Professor of American Studies 1970-94 (Emeritus), Professorial Fellow 1994-95; FRSL 1976; CBE 1991; Kt 2000; married 1959 Elizabeth Salt (two sons); died Norwich 27 November 2000.

Published by Peter Guttridge

November 29, 2000

Independent, The (London),

http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qn4158/is_20001129/ai_n14355669/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1

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