MALCOLM BRADBURY

Novelist, Literary Critic, Playwright, Screenplay Writer, Editor, Essayist, Humorist, Teacher.
Born 1932; died 2000. Active 1959-2000 in England, Britain, Europe

Malcolm Bradbury’s range of talents as a novelist, literary critic, writer for television and university teacher made him an influential presence on the British and international cultural scene. The primary theme in his seven well-crafted novels was the plight of liberal humanism in the later twentieth century as it came under threat from ideologies which denied or diminished the role of the individual, such as Marxism, structuralism, monetarism and postmodernism. His chief fictional mode was comedy of a kind that combined verbal wit, the humour of situations, and sharp satirical observation of contemporary attitudes, appearances and forms of behaviour. Bradbury was often associated, and sometimes confused, with David Lodge ; both were leading exponents of the modern campus novel, a genre which, like the contemporary university itself, has expanded well beyond traditional academic confines; but Bradbury did not share Lodge’s Roman Catholic beliefs and his novels, unlike those of Lodge, give no hint of a possible source of transcendent redemption. Behind the laughter and troubled liberal humanism there are glimpses of a bleaker vision that calls to mind Sartre, Camus and Samuel Beckett; there is also a sense of the inescapable pressure of history.

Bradbury was born into a lower middle-class family in Sheffield, Yorkshire, on 7 September 1932. The family moved to London in 1935 but Bradbury and his brother and mother came back to Sheffield in 1941, where he had first-hand experience of the pressure of history in the “very terrifying” form of the heavy German bombing that the city suffered. Later the family went to live in Nottingham, and Bradbury attended West Bridgford Grammar School from 1943-50. He started writing at this time and was proud that his first short stories, like those of D. H. Lawrence, were published in the Nottinghamshire Guardian. In 1950 he went to the University College of Leicester, and began his first novel there; after taking a first-class degree in English in 1953, he moved on to Queen Mary College, University of London, where he gained his MA in 1955. For the next four years, he moved between Manchester University in England and Indiana University in the USA as a postgraduate student and teaching assistant, while continuing to work on his first novel and gaining experience that would feed into his second. His enforced return to England in 1958 for a major heart operation concentrated his mind wonderfully and spurred him to complete Eating People is Wrong (1959) in hospital. In a few hectic days the following year, his novel was published, he married Elizabeth Salt, with whom he would later have two sons, and he took up his first teaching post as an adult-education tutor at the University of Hull.

Article contributed by

Nicolas Tredell, University of Sussex

First published 02 June 2004

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