Malcolm (Stanley) Bradbury Biography

(1996) I suppose my fiction—six novels and a volume of short stories, as well as many television scripts and film screenplays, and three "television novels"—roughly follows the pattern, the styles and cultural and moral concerns, that have run through British fiction over the now five decades over which I've been writing. I began writing fiction in the 1950s when, in the period after the defeat of fascism, and in the aftermath of the Holocaust and the nuclear bomb, the novel in Britain moved back toward social and moral realism. In the wake of those events, there was also a strong concern with the problems affecting liberal and humanistic values. In fact if my books do possess one consistent theme (I believe they do), then that is their concern with the problems of liberalism, humanism, and general moral responsibility in the late 20th-century world.

In my earlier novels (Eating People Is Wrong, Stepping Westward), the central characters are concerned if confused moral agents, liberals not in the political but the moral sense, trying to do a reasonable amount of good in a difficult world, generally with comic, ironic or near-tragic results. I wrote Eating People is Wrong when I was 20 and was a university undergraduate, fascinated by the liberal universe of academic life, a place of often confused humanism and idealistic goodwill. I revised it a little later to make it more a retrospective general portrait of intellectual life in the British 1950s. With Stepping Westward, the result of several years in American universities as a graduate student, and about an American campus in the troubled years of anti-liberal sentiment that came from the witch-hunting of Senator McCarthy, I became interested in the different transatlantic meanings of liberalism, and I also began to explore my sense that humanism was in conflict with the hard realities of cold war politics and also with an age of materialist obsessions, self-seeking, and desire.

That theme is treated with a far harsher irony in The History Man, set in British academic life in the aftermath of the student revolutions of 1968. Its central character, Howard Kirk, is a radical sociologist who believes he is the spokesperson of a Marxist revolutionary process—history itself—that will still sweep away everything in its path; he tries to seduce his students and his colleagues into his bed and into the radical future. It is an ironic and a somewhat dark novel, as its liberal characters become incompetent in the face of inhumane theory and ideology. My next novel, Rates of Exchange, written at the beginning of the 1980s, is somewhat more hopeful. Dealing with various visits to Eastern European countries and my feeling that the rigid grid of the Marxist state was being increasingly undermined by the playfulness of language and the enduring power of the human imagination, it is set in an imaginary Eastern European state, Slaka, which is undergoing a language revolution. Its central character is a magical realist novelist, Katya Princip, who uses fiction to break free of ideology—and who in a later incarnation (see further on) becomes president of the country after it finally throws off its Stalinism. Like a number of British novelists I had also by now become fascinated by the opportunities of television drama in Britain. My next book, Cuts: A Very Short Novel, deals with this. A comedy about the making of what proves an abortive television series in the monetarist years of Mrs Thatcher's 1980s, it is about cuts in two senses: the cuts to British services that happened in the New Conservative 1980s, and the filmic technique of cutting.

Since some of these books are set in or around universities, I have often been thought of as a "campus novelist," and described as a progenitor of what is now called "the university novel." This is true to a point: I was a first-generation university student fascinated by the strangeness of the academic and intellectual world, and so made it fictional country. I have also spent most of my adult life teaching in universities in a number of countries; I am a professor of American studies and a teacher of creative writing, though now part-time; I have written a good deal of literary criticism, and been influenced by it. So my first book is set in a British redbrick in the 1950s, when it was a place of social change; my second is set on American campus near the Rockies at the start of the 1960s when it seemed a place of liberation; my third is set in a British new university as the 1960s died and the 1970s began, and radical hopes were beginning to be replaced by hard economic realities. I see them more as books about their decades, their themes, ideas, emotions, hypocrisies, intellectual fashions, and preoccupations; a university environment means that I can write about historically self-conscious and self-critical characters, the types who most interest me. I most see myself as a comic novelist, mixing satirical and ironic social and intellectual observation with play and parody. If I started writing in a time when the British novel was both thematically and technically provincial, I have tried to break out of that and become a more cosmopolitan, international, and technically elaborate writer. In Rates of Exchange, for example, I sought to find not only a larger subject matter, the question of what ideology we seek to live by in the late 20th century, but also a different language; in fact much of the novel exploits the technique of using English spoken by non-native speakers as its tone of voice.

My books have thus changed considerably over the years (and will continue to do so), but so has British fiction, which during the later 1960s and 1970s grew far more cosmopolitan and technically varied. As writer and critic, I have been very interested in postmodern experiment and found many of my more recent influences abroad. From The History Man onward, my books became harsher in tone, more elaborate technically, and they challenge some of the traditional ideas of character, realism of presentation, and moral confidence with which British novels have so often been written. Rates of Exchange thus deals with the problem of the British writer who uses a language deeply changed by its modern role as a lingua franca, and a world where stories become less reassuring and more ambiguous. This probably makes some of my later works rather more ironic, parodic, and less companionable, though I also think it makes them better. During the 1980s, for various reasons, I also found myself using the form of what I think of as the "television novel," that is, novel-like forms and ideas written and produced as television series. I liked television's immediacy, its rich techniques, its fast narrative pace. Anything More Would Be Greedy, a six-part series for Anglia Television, is about a group of students growing older, richer, and ever more cynical in Mrs Thatcher's entrepreneurial Britain; while The Gravy Train and The Gravy Train: The Economic Miracle (forthcoming) are both four-part drama series for Channel 4, dealing ironically with the European Community as it reaches toward the great late 20th century dream of European integration. The second series is once again about Slaka, after the fall of the Berlin Wall, and its attempts under President Katya Princip to join the mysterious entity of "Europe."

So my concerns and interests have widened. My sixth novel, Doctor Criminale, is a comedy about a tainted philosopher who has been a powerful intellectual influence during the Cold War period, and is now being seen as the philosopher of the Nineties. It's my attempt to deal with the great transformation that came with the end of the 45-year Cold War era, and to capture the climate as the new century, indeed a new millennium, approaches. I have continued to write regularly in a wide variety of media—books, television, film, and radio—and both in fiction and non-fiction, especially literary criticism and, increasingly, journalism. Having now retired from university teaching—mostly recently the teaching of creative writing—and working as a full-time writer, I am, though, returning ever more refreshed to the novel. I still think of it as my primary and essential form—an ever-changing form that inevitably alters a good deal in history for any writer who isn't chiefly concerned with perpetuating the popular genres or simply providing entertainment.

I view my books as works of comic and satirical observation, which amongst other things explore both the decades in which they're set, and the changing moods and modes of fiction. Socially they explore the moral 1950s, the radical 1960s, the cautious 1970s, the entrepreneurial 1980s, and now the nervous and increasingly cynical 1990s. In form they shift from moral comedy to harder irony, where the comic more nearly touches the tragic. I stay fascinated by fiction's fictionality, and regard all our forms of exploring knowledge as forms of fiction-making, which is one reason why I regard the novel as central. Since it acknowledges its fictionality, and often explores its own method and declares its own scepticism, it stays at best one of our chief ways of discovering and naming the world. At the same time it depends on a sense of truth, a feeling for reality, a response to the authentic experience of individual humanity. And, if my books are satirical explorations of current confusion, pain, and inauthenticity, they hardly (as some critics have said) betoken the end of humanism. In fact the novel belongs with the spirit of "liberalism," in the better sense of that word: the challenging of ideologies, intellectual fashions and inhuman systems or theories through sympathy and the imagination. Which is why I think the novel is always under challenge, but is far from dead.

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Ever since the 1959 publication of his first novel, Eating People Is Wrong, Malcolm Bradbury has been regarded as an extremely witty satirist, lampooning topical phenomena and issues. He excels in group scenes: the cautiously wild and slap-stick university party that mixes faculty and students in Eating People Is Wrong ; the American faculty committee meeting to choose a writer-in-residence that begins Stepping Westward and is ironically contrasted with the concluding one a year later; the department meeting that combines haggling over procedure, trivia, several forms of self-seeking, and genuine academic concerns in The History Man ; the adult education class that was apparently cut from Eating People Is Wrong and, in revised form, printed in the collection of Who Do You Think You Are? ; the guest lectures of and alcoholic lunches for the English linguist on a two-week tour of the country in "central Eastern Europe" that prides itself on "clean tractors" and a "reformed watercress industry" in Rates of Exchange. All these pieces bring people, representing various points of view on some current question of politics or communal definition, into sharp, comically outrageous conflict or misunderstanding.

Bradbury often castigates a whole contemporary milieu through scenes like the "with-it," consciously "existential" party, a license for free self-definition, arranged by the "new university" sociologist, Howard Kirk, in The History Man. Bradbury also exploits his talent for mimicry of current attitudes, modes of speech (like the variety of ways to mangle English in Rates of Exchange), and the style and themes of other writers. A long section of Who Do You Think You Are?, for example, contains astringent parodies of Snow, Amis, Murdoch, Braine, Sillitoe, and others, along with less biting and salient echoes of Angus Wilson and Lawrence Durrell. The use of Amis (with whose early work Bradbury's has often been compared) is particularly resonant. Like Amis, Bradbury sometimes includes characters from one fiction in another, like the free-loving psychologist, Flora Beniform, who is both Howard Kirk's uncommitted mistress in The History Man and a central character on the television panel concerning modern sexual mores satirized in the story "Who Do You Think You Are?" As an in-joke, Bradbury even appropriates the Amis character who doesn't appear, the fraudulent L.S. Caton used in a number of novels until Amis finally killed him off in The Anti-Death League. Bradbury makes him a professor, scheduled to visit Benedict Arnold University in the U.S. to give a lecture on the "angry young men," who never arrives. In spite of all the critical comparisons and interlocking references, Bradbury's satire is different from Amis's, Bradbury generally more concerned with issues and ideas, less implicitly committed to pragmatic success in the world or, until the recent Rates of Exchange, to mocking various forms of contemporary incompetence.

Much of Bradbury's fiction takes place within a university setting: the provincial red-brick during the 1950s in Eating People Is Wrong, the American university in the flat wilderness of the Plains states in Stepping Westward the new south coast university in 1972 in The History Man. Yet, as Bradbury himself has rightly insisted, the applications of his fiction extend beyond the university, just as the implications of his moral treatments of contemporary experience are far from slapstick comedy. In Stepping Westward the Englishman, James Walker, who becomes writer-in-residence at the "moral supermarket" of the American university, begins with his own "decent modest radicalism" and tries to extend himself to assimilate more of the modern world, looking for "sense and design." The plot depends on Walker's public refusal to sign an American loyalty oath, part of his English "faith in unbelief," and the America he finds is one of "violence and meaninglessness and anarchy." In The History Man Howard Kirk, seen far less sympathetically than James Walker is, seeks "liberation" and "emancipation" in the new university for himself and others, ignoring or condescending to his old friend, Beamish, a rather bumbling locus of value in the novel, who claims "there is an inheritance of worthwhile life in this country." In this novel, written entirely in the rush of the present tense, Kirk chooses instead to redevelop the town, to lie, to manipulate others in the name of the "now" and the "new," and to ignore the voice of a young English teacher who sees her function as simply reading and talking about books. In both novels Bradbury's moral focus is clear and searching, although it sometimes seems slightly provincial. He attacks the self-seeking, the self-deceptive, and the meretricious, like a career academic named Froelich who becomes chairman in Stepping Westward and Kirk himself in The History Man. Yet some of Bradbury's work has more complexity and distance than outlining the moral framework might suggest. Sometimes, as in The History Man,, which ends with Kirk's wife deliberately pushing her arm through the window, an act of self-destruction like that more ambivalently performed by Beamish at an earlier party, or in a short story entitled "A Very Hospitable Person," the satire seems brittle, almost cruel, in denying the central figures any humanity or self-doubt. At other times, as in an excellent story called "A Breakdown," about a student having a futile affair with a married man in Chesterfield who runs off to Spain to punish herself, or as in Stepping Westward, where James Walker recognizes that America has defeated him, that, in spite of all his morality, he could not really handle his own freedom to define himself, Bradbury's perspective is more sympathetic without diluting the moral concern. A prefatory note to Rates of Exchange characterizes the novel as "a paper fiction, offered for exchange" that illustrates "our duty to lie together, in the cause, of course, of truth." Beneath its comic texture of constant mutual misunderstanding and incompetence (sometimes overdone), Bradbury sensitively questions the comfortable assumption of virtue or truth in any of the various national, political, intellectual, or sexual languages that form systems of human exchange.

Bradbury's commitment to liberal humanism has always been tempered by a willingness to test its continuing viability against various cultural, political, and economic challenges. And nowhere is that willingness more clearly evident than in Doctor Criminale. This witty fiction about fashionable literary theory, as well as the fashion for literary theory, is also, appropriately enough, Bradbury's most self-consciously intertextual novel to date, drawing on an impressive array of literary precedents which include his own Rates of Exchange, Cuts, and two Gravytrain television series as well as his friend David Lodge's Small World, an updating of the campus novel for an age of the global campus. But in many respects the work Doctor Criminale draws on most is F. Scott Fitzgerald's "symbolist tragedy," The Great Gatsby, "about the struggle of the symbolic imagination to exist in lowered historical time, and about that symbol's inherent ambiguity, its wonder and its meretriciousness," as Bradbury wrote in The Modern American Novel.

Doctor Criminale is, of course, a comedy, not a tragedy, and its subject is theory's, not the symbol's, essential ambiguity. Bradbury's Nick Carraway is the hapless, anachronistlc Francis Jay, a verbal man and naive liberal humanist adrift in the visual culture of entrepreneurial England. And his Gatsby is a man no less able to inspire wonder in his admirers, the supercritic and celebrity thinker Bazlo Criminale. Criminale, the "text" Jay sets out to decode, proves a most elusive quarry. As mysterious as Eliot's famous MacCavity the Cat, he seems less a person than a floating signifier who exists largely as a collection of mutually exlusive interpretations, or signifieds. He is alternately a philosopher who has declared the end of philosophy and a master mystifier pulling books and articles out of his theoretical hat; perhaps a spy, though maybe a double agent, an ardent Communist or, what is just as likely, an ardent anti-Communist. Above all he is a version of the late Yale deconstructionist, Paul de Man, who posthumously became the subject of intense controversy following the discovery of articles he had written during the Nazi occupation. Like de Man, Criminale seems to be a man at best "flexible" and at worst "a moral disappointment." Bradbury's jokey magical mystery tour of the political, economic, and literary landscape at the end of the Cold War and on the eve of the European Community, thus, does more than just delight; it also "problematizes" both fashionable theory and old-fashioned liberal humanism by having each "interrogate" the other. However, Doctor Criminale does more than illuminate their relative strengths and weaknesses; in examining theory in a specific historical context, Bradbury also examines many of the defining features of the culture in which theory has been so ardently promoted and just as strenuously resisted.

During the late 1990s, Bradbury did not produce any novel-length fiction; rather, he directed his attention toward drama, offering up plays (including Insider Trading) and an adaptation of Stella Gibbons's Cold Comfort Farm for the 1996 film directed by John Schlesinger. He also edited anthologies and wrote about the subject he has experienced both from outside and inside, literature.