I wrote this a while ago but, reading it through just now, I wouldn’t change anything about it.
Malcolm Bradbury isn’t exactly forgotten. But given how important a figure he was, within the UK literary scene, he isn’t much thought of or talked about. And his writing, particularly The History Man, deserves more attention. I can’t think of a book that so entirely captures an exact cultural moment — even though it was written over six or seven years. Maybe it comes across as a difficult read — those chunky paragraphs, one after another — but it’s far less so than most of the books Fitzcarraldo publish; maybe the sexual politics is dated, but it’s a satire and, in a very unEnglish, postmodern way, it’s also a satire of itself.
Perhaps this I should just take all this as a lesson in how literary reputations can crumble or collapse. But I was talking to someone the other evening about how mischievous Malcolm was, as a teacher — you’ll see below, if you read on.
I think we’re missing this sense of mischief, in how we read and teach and write.
I do miss him.
The last time I saw Malcolm Bradbury was in a Chinese restaurant, in a multi-story carpark, in the centre of Norwich. We were sitting at a very long table, watching as some of that year’s University of East Anglia creative writing students (Andrew Motion’s, Malcolm had retired a couple of years earlier) sang karaoke to ‘Wannabe’ by the Spice Girls. They were jumping up and down, quite happy to look, and sound, ridiculous. The music was too loud for conversation to be comfortable, but I managed to get Malcolm to tell me about meeting Nabokov. Everything — the soundtrack, the MSG-heavy debris on the table, the students’ lack of embarrassment — was suitably incongruous.
Malcolm was a humorous man, so much so that I don’t think he was ever in a situation out of which he didn’t try to extract, secretly or not, the maximum amusement. (I could feel, sitting next to him, that he found our situation in the Chinese restaurant amusing.) Of course, this is a dangerous thing to have known about one, and so Malcolm had developed an impeccable deadpan — through years of interviews, panels, conferences, inter-departmental meetings.
Once, at the very end of my time as a UEA student, I caught a glimpse of Malcolm with the mask completely off. The students from his final teaching year had just done a reading from the annual anthology. We were having a drink in the theatre foyer. Someone asked Malcolm a question about his writing for TV and how much he got paid for it. For a moment, it was as if — at the ludicrousness of it all — his face had exploded. He looked like a mad-haired, mad-eyed Dionysus. ‘I have my price,’ he said, gleefully.
By the time I arrived at UEA, Malcolm had been teaching the creative writing M.A., on and more than occasionally off, for twenty-five years. Along with Angus Wilson, he had started it. In an extraordinary mutual luck-out, their first student had been Ian McEwan. One of the things that attracted me to the course was this generational lineage — each of them ‘did’ a particular moment in English society: Wilson the aspirant ’50s, Bradbury the moment the ’60s turned into the ’70s, McEwan the concrete-gray ’70s. Their prose had a familiar solidity: dense, squarish paragraphs.
Given the huge amount of time he’d spent with earnest and ambitious young writers, it was hardly surprising that Malcolm looked for the comedy in them — and did his best, whenever he could, to draw it out. I’ll give you a few examples.
To mark his retirement at the end of that academic year, Hodder & Stoughton were intending to bring out an anthology of writing by people who had either attended (Kazuo Ishiguro, Glenn Patterson) or taught on (Rose Tremain, Clive Sinclair) the course. One evening after class, in the UEA bar, Malcolm announced to the twelve of us, squeezed into a booth, that he was editing this anthology. ‘Which means,’ he said, looking round the circle of earnest, ambitious faces, ‘that I’ll have to put one of you lot in it.’ Bang! The comedy grenade, for that’s what the comment was, went off.
On another occasion, also in the bar, Malcolm began reminiscing about previous students. He told us about Ian McEwan, and then about the gap between him and Kazuo Ishiguro. There had, he implied, been physically-present writers between Ian and Ish, but none of enough account to have earned the right to a name. This was terrifying, in itself, as Malcolm must have known, but it wasn’t quite enough: ‘Of course,’ he added, ‘the ones who have done really well had almost nothing to do with the others in their year.’ Bang, again.
I don’t think Malcolm wanted his creative writing classes to be touchy-feely lovefests; I think he deliberately encouraged rivalries — partly for his own amusement, partly because he believed that writing is competitive. This didn’t work for all the students; me, it suited fine.
Teachers are never meant to have favourites, though they always do; and they are absolutely warned off letting their students guess who these favourites are, though it’s usually possible to guess. Malcolm, quite obviously, had favourites — and he made no attempt at all to disguise who they were.
Our classes took place in the Arthur Miller Centre — a nondescript room with a blackboard, a glass-fronted bookcase and nine or ten black leather chairs that had once, so we heard, been used for Mastermind. The only extraordinary thing about the room was that, regularly, during the Spring term, a hot-air balloon would rise from behind the row of trees that usually filled the view.
Towards the middle of the Winter term, after almost all of us had submitted at least one piece of work, Malcolm fell in love. He had read something that he thought was brilliant, and he was openly overjoyed about it. While we went off for a mid-class break, Malcolm took the young writer aside — I remember his arm going around their shoulder, but I think this is a distorted memory of under-his-wing. They headed off for a private chat in Malcolm’s office, of which we heard only the beginning, ‘Tell me, do you have an agent?… How much of the novel have you written?… Do you think you might have, say, six chapters ready by the end of next week?’
The rest of us went, as usual, to the vending machines and bought Cokes, coffees, chocolate bars; some smoked. There was no mistaking what had happened: the favourite had been chosen — and it wasn’t any of us. Bang!
It is hard to believe Malcolm planned the devastating effect this had on the class, but imagine the comedy-potential of the scene. It’s painfully funny — even more so if you imagine the unlikelihood of us all getting up to sing a karaoke version of ‘Wannabe’.
Malcolm was prepared to show us that writing, whilst non-competitive in the moment of creation, does in the end produce winners and losers. (Of course, the end isn’t ever exactly reached.) And also, which is which — winner, loser — does not depend on the sincerity and dedication of the writer so much as the delight and intoxication of the reader. (The reader, who has no reason to be fair.) This is a harsh view, very far from straight-forwardly nurturing, but as a preparation for the world of books — of rejection letters and prizes, dumpbins and remainders — it was entirely apt.
I owe him.
Malcolm was the person who gave me my first big break, by including some of my short stories in his Class Work anthology. Through this, I ended up getting an editor and publisher.
Around 2001, sitting on a bench outside the UEA Drama Studio, I wrote this little poem for him —
i.m. Malcolm Bradbury
The thing concluded here was that
so inconclusive thing: a life —
we’ll never know exactly what
it meant — a lost, unopened gift.
The comfort of the burial
may be the here-concluded thing
though lost and immaterial
is present in the wondering.