Doctor Criminale

Malcolm | Bradbury

Doctor Criminale

PICADOR

1970
by Ian McEwan

A Tribute to Malcolm Bradbury

I graduated from the University of Sussex in the summer of 1970. At that time in England it was still possible to feel, if not to argue, that the chief concern of serious literature was moral and that its riveting complexities, especially in novels, were mediated by choice. What imaginary people chose to do or failed to do marked their destiny and settled their hash, with the author handing various ethical rosettes out along the way.

At the age of twenty-two I considered myself to be five years into a scholarly apprenticeship that had come adrift, and I was feeling restless. I had had an intense sixth form at a boarding grammar school – I’m one of those writers who feels his conscious adult life began under the magic spell of his English master – and had continued more vaguely and eclectically at university. Now all that was over and I had a degree, and I was beginning to understand that unlike Oedipus or Coriolanus or Lord Jim, I myself had never really chosen anything at all. I hadn’t even made an interesting mistake. I was convinced that my life had not yet begun. Writing, ‘being’ a writer, that was still a vague and intensely private ambition – the usual idle dreams. I had a clearer notion that the last thing I wanted was regular employment, and that it would therefore be a good idea to remain a student. I wanted to be in a town where no one knew me and I could start again.

I had been accepted at a couple of universities to do a Ph.D., but the relevant government department mercifully refused to fund me and offered instead a year’s grant to study for an MA anywhere I wanted. I liked the ‘anywhere’ more than the ‘study’. If literature was a stately conversation conducted down the generations, then I was bored with merely listening. I wanted to join in. But like many young would-be writers I had no urgent subject matter.

I’d made a few stabs at greatness during my final undergraduate year. I proudly kept a notebook. I’d written a long Yeatsian poem about circus animals, though whether they deserted or revolted, I don’t recall. I had composed one of the worst radio plays ever written, about a saint who is so good he stinks, and everyone who comes across him, what with the world being so corrupt, is compelled to vomit. There were two other plays, equally useless, and I had also started a novella called
The Man Who Hated Pain
.

The summer began and I had still not made an application for an MA. I went to the Aldeburgh Festival on a scholarship, worked in an ice-cream warehouse in Brighton, and spent the remaining weeks of the summer in Italy with my girlfriend. By the time I came back in September all my friends were fixed up with jobs or further study. It was time to make a choice. I went to stay at my parents’ house on an army base near Middle Wallop and tried to think myself into a job. Teaching? I couldn’t face it. Advertising was supposed to be a creative world, but I had absorbed a little of Arnold and a lot of Leavis and I loathed adverts with a high-minded passion. The Diplomatic Service? The support of the Wilson government for US policy in Vietnam had more or less finished off that possibility for me, though I still had fantasies of myself in a dishdasha, fluent in Arabic and desert lore, a gentleman scholar and man of the world.

I had brought with me a dozen university prospectuses and I thumbed them sceptically, fully aware that a course description is a literary sub-genre, enlivened by unfalsifiable half-truths and unredeemable promises – advertising. For all that, I was struck by the offer of full immersion, in Norwich, at the University of East Anglia, in post-war American and British fiction, with some literary theory on the side, a dose of comparative European nineteenth-century literature, and the option of handing in at the end of the year 25,000 words of fiction in place of an academic mini-thesis.

Norwich sounded just like that ‘anywhere’. American novels suited me, and there was the extraordinary offer of the fiction, so out of place in a university prospectus. I knew and liked the work of Malcolm Bradbury and Angus Wilson, who would be overseeing the MA. In a single, unprominent and understated paragraph my discontents and longings were addressed. A dream life was on offer. I made the first important conscious choice of my adult life and picked up the phone.

Within a minute I was talking to Professor Bradbury himself (the world was emptier and easier then). I explained that I’d read about the MA with the fiction component. He explained that no one had applied, that in this, its first year, the fiction side of the course had been closed down. It had never got off the ground.

I suggested that my phone call was a sort of application and he suggested that I send him my fiction. In the same breath he invited me up for a chat. For the next two weeks I sat in the spare bedroom of my parents’ house and while my sunburn flaked wrote two short stories. I remember nothing of them beyond my assumption that single-spaced typing looked more serious. And I don’t remember much about the chat either. Essentially, I was in.

Norwich was further away in those days. The train took for ever, there was no motorway, the car-owning revolution was years ahead. The city I moved to in October 1970 appeared peaceful, clean and gratifyingly obscure. I arrived with my ambitions focused: I would do the academic work, for it accounted for four-fifths of the course, but I was here to write fiction. I knew no one in the city, I had made my choice, and real life could begin.

And it did. The year I spent in Norwich was the luckiest and one of the most productive in my life. My Sixties began. I made important, enduring friendships, and some tortuous, transient ones. I discovered the north Norfolk coast. I took mescalin. In a rented room on the Newmarket Road, and later, in a terraced house on Silver Road, I wrote thirty stories between October and June.

In the first few weeks of that autumn term I moved around like a character in my own unwritten novel, not Lord Jim exactly, but my own man at last, in control of a narrative that murmured incessantly in my inner ear.
He moved to a forgotten town and took a room in a big house. That night he put fifty sheets of paper on the table, took up a pencil and promised he would not leave until he had finished a short story.

In fact I worked into the dawn, so excited by the romance and heroism of it all that at intervals I could not write at all.
He paced the narrow room, biting on his knuckle.
The following day I typed up the completed story – it was called ‘Conversation with a Cupboardman’ – and delivered a carbon copy of it to Malcolm Bradbury’s office.

A week later we met up in the Maid’s Head for a very quick half-pint. He did not inquire whether I was mentally ill or out to shock him, and I took his equanimity entirely for granted. His few remarks were technical, and vaguely encouraging. He was mostly interested in getting me to describe what I was trying to do. I didn’t really know. The story seemed to have written itself.

‘I like it,’ he said at last, unemphatically. ‘It might be publishable. But let’s not think about that now. What are you going to write next?’

‘I want to spend the year writing short stories.’

‘Fine.’

‘I thought I might try out a number of deranged first-person narrators.’

‘Why not?’

‘One’s about a vile boy so anxious to lose his virginity he makes love to his younger sister.’

‘Let me have it by the end of the month.’

So a pattern was set. I met Malcolm occasionally in his office, or in the corridor and once or twice in the Maid’s Head. Our meetings never lasted more than fifteen minutes. He was much in demand, and sometimes elusive. Informality, muted judgement and a complete lack of interference were the principal elements of his pedagogic style. Behind it all was an unspoken but intensely radiated assumption that there was nothing quite so exciting or essential as the writing of fiction. To be the ‘product’ of his writing ‘course’ was to be the beneficiary of an absolute artistic licence and minimal guidance. It was a given that there was no subject that could not be written about. I don’t think I understood the extent of my privileges until five years later, when I published the stories from that time in book form and in the press was cast in the form of a macabre ghoul.

A good deal of my time was taken up with the academic requirements. Denys Lasdun’s brutal architectural dream was only a quarter-realized, but UEA was an optimistic, lively place. The seminars were intense and combative. I remember the first one I attended, when Malcolm was in his role as an academic expert in American literature and in the theory of the novel. He was a social creature and the seminar was his element.

He was in his late thirties then, and with his piled-up hair, narrow knitted tie and lopsided grin there was something of the miscreant Teddy boy about him. In a hesitant, lilting voice (so hard to place, that accent) he set out for us the course of study ahead and the various teachers, and then led us into a general discussion about the novel.

It was a brilliant session. Within minutes, it seemed, he had communicated a sense of adventure: the vitality of the novel as a form, its deep seriousness, its variety, the pleasures as well as the instruction in life it conveyed, its rich past and unguessable future. A general discussion began – a more formal version of the partying years ahead of us. Nearly all of the other students had been undergraduates at UEA. The other outsider in the seminar was Jon Cook from Cambridge, who decades later became Dean of Humanities at UEA.

Malcolm was a generous listener who laughed easily at other people’s jokes. (Who can forget that delighted, whinnying giggle?) I’m sure he made us feel cleverer than we were. I was keen to impress him. We all were. I paraded my reading of Ortega y Gasset. Jon Cook appeared to be the world expert on Hegel. How tolerant Malcolm must have been. But he knew what he was about. We came away ready to start on the huge reading list he had given us.

We read Bellow, Nabokov, Burroughs, Mailer, Updike, Roth, Gaddis, a reading list whose rubric these days would have to be ‘Men’s Studies’. For reasons of his own, Malcolm included Borges and Julio Cortázar and they were important discoveries for me. The post-war British novel received less emphasis, but I remember John Fowles’s
The Collector
making a big impression on me, as well as several novels of Muriel Spark. I heard words like ‘postmodern’, ‘fictive’ and ‘faction’ for the first time.

I ‘compared’
Middlemarch
to
Anna Karenina
, and I handed in essays on theories of representation, but the reading lists made the lasting impression. The ambition, the social range, the expressive freedom of American writing made much English fiction seem poky and grey. To find bold and violent colours became the imperative in my stories. Touches of Roth and Burroughs crept into my writing. The struggle with influence, Malcolm told me once, was part of the pleasure of finding your own way.

There were plenty of other writers and would-be writers around, and a good deal of writing talk. Jonathan Raban had given up his academic career to write, but still returned from London regularly. Victor Sage, who had just been appointed lecturer, was starting to write stories. John Webb, with whom I shared a house, was planning travel pieces. Snoo Wilson and Clive Sinclair had graduated the year before and put in appearances. The immensely gifted Rose Tremain was living in Norwich.

In the spring term came Angus Wilson. That mischievous pink face floating above a linen suit seemed like the living emblem of the strawberries-and-champagne garden parties for which he was celebrated among his students. An opulent glow surrounded him and his friend Tony Garret. They were an incongruous couple on the concrete walkways with their carefree air of being globally well connected.

They brought a strange light from another world – pre-war, upper middle class, bohemian, dandified, but very serious too. From Angus and Tony I understood what it could mean to perform in, to be classy in, conversation. They collected people with a passion. Angus had a particular penchant for hippy girls. He liked to exclaim loudly and fuss over their bangles and pendants. He and Tony would happily come and sit on the floor of a student flat and perform.

Angus was the reader I had in mind when I wrote a story called ‘Disguises’, but I’m not certain that he ever said much to me about my stories, except to tick me off once for homophobia (another new word), and to imply that I was to inherit the spirit of nastiness represented by his famous short story ‘Strawberry Jam’. I was invited to dinner at their cottage in Suffolk, where Angus did imitations, gossiped and told outrageous stories spiked with comic cruelty. On one occasion, just as I was leaving I overheard him tell another guest that I was a
writer
. For a long time afterwards I lived in the glow of that remark.

When I came back to Norwich after a long absence in Kabul, I slipped into one of his seminars. Without breaking flow, he waved me into a chair. ‘Dear boy, we must get you some Arts Council money.’ He was chairman at the time. ‘How lean and brown you are. Now, Dickens was already treating the anti-Americanism of his predecessors as something of a racket . . .’