Malcolm Bradbury:
A History Man For
Our Times
The
death last November of the academic and author Malcolm Bradbury from a rare
form of pneumonia has robbed British Literature of a generous and expansive voice
which had much to say over the last forty years. Bradbury rose to the top of an
establishment often hidebound by snobbish values, building a reputation for
being unafraid to experiment in his work, and to encourage freedom of
experimentation in others.
The
son of a Nottingham railway worker, he took a First in English Literature at
the then University College of Leicester. He then embarked upon postgraduate
study at Queen Mary and Westfield College, London, and Manchester University,
where he completed a doctoral thesis on the work of expatriate Beat Writers in
Paris. It was around this time whilst shuttling between Manchester and a
teaching post at Sheffield, that he fell ill with a heart condition that caused
an early brush with death. This was only averted with pioneering surgery.
Whilst recovering in hospital he completed his novel Eating People is Wrong
(1959), which nods to the work of Trilling and Bellow as well as to Kingsley
Amis' Lucky Jim.
He
then studied Creative Writing on a Fulbright Scholarship at the University of
Indiana, an experience which imbued his second novel, Stepping Westwards
(1965), with an outsider's fascination with American culture. From Indiana, he
returned to Britain, to his first full-time post at Hull University. In 1961 he
joined the English Department at Birmingham University, where he formed a
lifelong friendship with a fellow lecturer, and writer, David Lodge.
In
1965 he moved to the new University of East Anglia (U.E.A.) in Norwich, the
city he lived in for the rest of his life. It is now a centre famous for the
study of English, American, and Comparative Literature, Creative Writing and
for the exchange programmes that it runs in
conjunction with American and European Universities, all of this due in no
small part to Bradbury's efforts. In 1970 he was made Professor of American
Studies, a post he held until the 1990s. It was characteristic that, despite
the growing demands of his many commitments, he maintained his close links with
U.E.A. right up to his death in 2000.
As
an academic, he produced a dazzling array of literary criticism, including
groundbreaking work on American Literature from a British perspective, The
Modern American Novel in 1983 and From Puritanism to Postmodernism: A History
of American Literature (with Richard Rutland) in 1991. He also wrote on more
specifically British movements No, Not Bloomsbury (1987), and also sought to
offer critical work which could demonstrate the cross-fertilization occurring
between national literatures, e.g. The Modern Novel (1977) and The Atlas of
Literature (1996), this latter work perhaps best exemplifying his eclectic,
inclusive tastes.
He
was also a keen book reviewer for the popular press, turning out a thousand
reviews over the years. More than one obituary noted the constructive attitude
he brought to his reviewing. When his Booker-nominated Rates of Exchange was
mauled by Martin Amis in The New Statesman in the early 1980s Bradbury was
saddened, but when Amis' own The Information belly-flopped in the 1990s, Bradbury's
was one of the few voices raised in its defence.
Academic
culture was Bradbury's favoured element, and his
third novel, The History Man (1975) brilliantly evoked the radical atmosphere
on Britain's 'new' university campuses: the University of Watermouth
provides the perfect camouflage for the Machiavellian sociologist Howard Kirk,
as he destroys marriages and careers in his drive towards greatness. This novel
is darker and more pessimistic than its predecessors; it earnt
him the Heinemann Award, and a T.V. commission: he went on to adapt it into a
hugely popular serial.
This afforded him the delight of a parallel
career as a T.V. scriptwriter, which he pursued with equal vigour
both when adapting others' work and producing his own original material. His adaptations took in broad dark
farce (Tom Sharpe's Porterhouse Blues), horror (Kingsley Amis' The Green Man),
crime drama (Reginald Hill's Dalziel and Pascoe
Stories) and period comedy (Stella Cribbon's Cold
Comfort Farm). This last work, directed by John Schlesinger, was a hit in
Britain and elsewhere, and subsequently earnt a
theatrical release. Porterhouse Blues was produced in the mid-1980s, and was
still garnering awards a decade later (it won a Monte Carlo T.V. Award in
1993). It is a further mark of his prodigious output that his version of
William Cooper's Thies from Provincial Life has yet
to be screened.
His
original T.V. work embraced both the popular (episodes of Inspector Morse and Kavanagh QC) and the political (he produced two sharp
satires on European Community graft in the early 1990s, The Gravy Train and The
Gravy Train Goes East).
Bradbury's
novels often depict an innocent liberal hero attempting to find a way through
strange (and sometimes threatening) territory. This image could also have
served as a description of an academic abroad in the uncertain land of
television production, but he took it all in his stride, telling me recently
that one of the things he missed most about his days in Birmingham was working
for the local B.B.C. Studios, as it had been such an exciting centre for new
talent. If anything, T.V. work presented him with an invaluable store of
anecdotes with which to regale friends and audiences. I remember him bringing a
packed audience at the 1993 U.E.A. Literary Festival down with a tale of how
filming had once nearly ended in calamity. The climax of Porterhouse Blues
comes when an Oxbridge College is blown up after an elderly maid inadvertently
ignites some hydrogen-filled condoms. This scene was shot at a stately home in
the south of England. All appeared to be going well, until the controlled
explosion turned int o something bigger: 'Instead of
the relatively small explosion we were all expecting, there was this huge
column of fire, a deafening boom... Bits of brick all over the place . . . '. It transpired that no one had been injured, and the
impressive explosion was in the can. Panic then set in at the prospect of the
house's owner discovering the damage. The crew's fears were allayed after a
telephone call to London. 'It turned out that at that time the house belonged
to Colonel Gaddafy of Libya'.
It
was the novel however which was Bradbury's ultimate ideal, and he continued to
produce one honed and polished example of the form per decade. Following The
History Man, his next work, Rates of Exchange (1982) was short-listed for the
Booker Prize. Conceived as a result of his frenetic travels on behalf of the
British Council, Bradbury this time examined the international intellectual
community as well as the hilarity contained within language itself, English,
and the mittel-European 'Slakan'
tongue, invented over several years during many light-hearted meetings of the
British Council's Cambridge Writing Seminar of which Bradbury was chair for
eight years. It was through a contact made at the Cambridge seminar that
Bradbury was offered some time at the Yaddo Writer's
Colony, allowing him the space to complete the project which his generosity to
students and aspirant writers often denied him.
Malcolm
was one of the reasons why I chose to study at the University of East Anglia.
He was a modest hero: quietly spoken, but also fiercely intelligent and
voraciously well read, equally at home discussing the Beats, Shakespeare,
Enlightenment Philosophy, or contemporary television.
I
first heard him speak at the U.E.A. Literature Festival on the subject of his
penultimate novel, Dr. Criminale (1992), which
married the European academic travelogue of Rates of Exchange with the
political satire of the Gravy Train programmes,
epitomized by the shadowy figure of Dr. Bazlo Criminale, polyglot savant, often discussed but seldom
seen.
It
was during the discussion he had with his colleague Chris Bigsby
that he stated that he had arrived at university already having formed an image
of himself as a writer. Why? 'As a teenager I'd had stories published in my
local newspaper'. That was enough for me to equate my own stories written for a
sixth form fantasy fanzine with the early career of the maestro. It kept me
firing my scribblings off, despite the flat slap of
returned manuscripts in my hallway; and, in the second semester of my first
year, I finally had a poem accepted by a national magazine.
Last
May, discovering that we were neighbours, I screwed
up my courage and approached him for an interview about his most recent novel,
To The Hermitage, which alternates between the conflicts and couplings of the
members of a modern day academic excursion to Catherine the Great's
Winter Palace, with an account of the philosopher Denis Diderot's pilgrimage to
the same royal court centuries before.
Studying
my notes on that interview, I am struck by the theme of literary heritage and
inheritance, thrown into relief by the arbitrary nature of fame. Despite his
phenomenal output, Diderot has been largely eclipsed by his contemporary
Voltaire. Nevertheless, parts of his oeuvre have reached us, through a variety
of sources, '... there are questions of posterity in the book ... Diderot was a
great writer and thinker, but he was also involved in something historical, where
the baton is passed from one generation to the next'.
This
process of passing the baton was one in which Bradbury was directly involved,
as part of the post-war generation of writers that included Murdoch, Golding,
and Kingsley Amis, which enlivened writing in Britain, and pointed the route to
post-modem experiment taken by such younger writers as McEwan, Rushdie, and Winterson.
The
genesis for To The Hermitage was a real life 'Diderot
Project' organised by the Technical University in
Stockholm, attended by several academics and writers from U.E.A. in the early
1990s. Debating the merits of rigorous academic inquiry and artistic freedom,
the group ferried across the Baltic to a St. Petersburg caught up in the
transition between Soviet and Capitalist Russia, '... I met an elderly Russian
librarian who was struggling so hard to save the Diderot Library [it was moved
to the Winter Palace after the writer's death]. I was so struck by her that I
started the novel the very next day. The following year she had died, and been
replaced by these spooks who wanted to do deals with you, a few roubles to look at this letter or whatever'.
The
precarious position of artists and their work is reflected in the novel;
Diderot must constantly consider his own and his family's safety in a 1770s'
Europe in the grip of political upheaval. And yet, the true artist has a vision
that takes in but also surpasses the merely contemporary. As Bradbury
explained, 'The writer is generally writing in the present for the future. In
the present, your books are burnt by the public hangman in the market square.
You have to publish under a pseudonym, in other countries...But you hope that
your work will strike a chord with people in the future'.
Some
commentators may have sought to interfere with this legacy, in a dismissal of
the campus novel (Bradbury's chosen element) as too introverted, but he
rebuffed such attitudes by pointing out that Hardy's Jude the Obscure was,
viewed from one angle, also a campus novel. In addition, by its very definition,
a campus novel is also about something that Malcolm Bradhury
found endlessly fascinating -- new and original ideas. In our interview he
explained why he was so drawn to this genre: 'In the 1950s Britain was a grey
place, fighting to pull itself out of its post-war gloom. That fight was
carried on in the places which had been built out of a hope and a desire for
learning, the red brick and later the new university campuses'. Places where
anyone who had the ability and interest could better themselves: Bradbury saw
education, and the self-expression that education brings, as a right of all
people, not just the well off in society. Bradbury was a rare example of a
British writer and critic whose whole care er was
lived outside the traditional Oxbridge elite.
The
Creative Writing M.A. that he founded with Angus Wilson in the mid- 1970s is
here to stay. One of the first of its kind in Britain, it spearheaded an
assault on the common prejudice that 'creative writing' has no place in a
pedagogical environment, and that 'creative endeavour'
is a vaguely disreputable pursuit. The course now boasts two Booker Prize
winners, as well as successive waves of exciting authors: Deidre Madden,
Matthew Singh-Toor, and Toby Litt
are just a few of the names who have graduated.
But
that is just part of Malcolm Bradbury's legacy, which stretches across prose,
screenwriting, journalism, teaching, and also encompassed an amazing array of
other public activities, as a member of the Booker Prize Management committee, the
British Association for American Studies, a patron of Norwich's Maddermarket Theatre, adviser on the Social Democratic
Party's Arts Policy Committee, and a founder of the British Council's New
Writing annual; a show casing of new work by literary newcomers and old hands
alike.
He
received the C.B.E. in 1991, and a Knighthood in 2000,
in recognition of his services to Literature. However, it is through his
relationships with family, friends, colleagues and students that he will be
most keenly remembered. He leaves behind a devoted wife and two adult sons.
Ian
McEwan, a former M.A. student of Malcolm Bradbury's, remembered in an article
for the Guardian newspaper recently how he had met Malcolm and Elizabeth
Bradbury in a deserted corridor shortly after he had won the Booker Prize for
Amsterdam in 1988. The elder statesman of English Letters congratulated his
erstwhile protegee with a warm, wordless hug.
I
now realise that he must have been ill when I met him
in May 2000, although he made little mention of it; it seems characteristic
that he would be so generous with his time and attention and that he would
spend half an hour discussing my research topic before we turned to his novel.
A
fitting epitaph amongst many came from a fellow academic and novelist, David
Lodge, writing in the week that Malcolm Bradbury died: 'Those who loved him
wished he would not tax himself so remorselessly, and wish so even more at his
untimely death. But it was useless to protest. Writing was his life'.
Jonathan
W. Doering was born in 1975 and educated at
universities in East Anglia, Dublin, and Sheffield. He has taught in Japan and
France, now lives in Oxford and is working on a novel about medieval English
clergy.
http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m2242/is_1622_278/ai_72986211/pg_1?tag=artBody;col1
Other interesting biographies: [Next] [1] [2] [3] [4] [5] [6] [7] [8]
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Creada: 06/10/2008 Última Actualización:
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