Lives in Writing (19 page)

Malcolm was not quite my first ‘writer-friend’, but he was the one most important to me, and remained so until his death in the year 2000, at the age of sixty-eight. It left a space in my life that could never be filled. Our careers were so closely entwined, especially in the early years, that without that relationship my own would have been significantly different – much less interesting and possibly less successful. We soon found we had much in common, but it was more than I realised until I read the fragments of autobiography in
Liar’s Landscape
, a posthumously published collection of miscellaneous writings edited by his son Dominic. We were both children of the war and the Blitz, traumatically separated for a time from home and parents, dimly aware of a vast historical drama being played out in which our little lives had been caught up with unpredictable consequences. It made both of us, I think, temperamentally cautious and prone to anxiety in later life, but ready to seize the opportunities which opened up in peacetime for the first beneficiaries of the 1944 Education Act. We both came from lower-middle-class backgrounds where there was no tradition of proceeding to higher education. My parents had to be convinced by the headmaster of my Roman Catholic grammar school that it would be a good idea for me to go to university, rather than to leave at sixteen and start earning my living. I literally didn’t know there were other universities than Oxford, Cambridge and London and didn’t for a moment consider applying to the first two, so I went to University College London to do (we didn’t say ‘read’) English for my BA degree, commuting from home. Malcolm was encouraged by his grammar school to apply for Oxbridge, but because his father would not countenance his staying on in the sixth form for that purpose after taking ‘A’ Levels, he went to what was then the University College of Leicester. Since its students sat the London University External exams in those days, we pursued essentially the same syllabus in English, and later both of us obtained London MAs – then a two-year research degree – doing our research in the Round Reading Room of the British Museum, though in different years.

It is interesting to speculate what difference it would have made to our subsequent careers if we had gone to Oxbridge. I suspect Malcolm would have adapted to it better than I, and he might have stayed on to become a don. In later life he enjoyed being a visiting Fellow at Oxford, and for many summers chaired an annual seminar for foreign academics and writers run by the British Council in a Cambridge college. He always seemed very happy and at home in these settings – the smooth lawns, gravelled paths and ancient buildings soothed his spirit, and the ritual of hall and high table appealed to him – but the redbrick University College Leicester, housed in a converted lunatic asylum, a brief glimpse of which inspired Kingsley Amis to write
Lucky Jim
, provided more useful material for a first novel in the 1950s.

Although we had much in common, there were also important differences between us, more obvious in some of our books than others. I was a Londoner by birth and upbringing; Malcolm’s roots, in spite of some early years in Metroland, were essentially provincial. He was born in Sheffield, grew up in Nottingham, and never felt at ease in the capital. In time he developed a liking for country life. When we met I was a practising and fairly orthodox Catholic, and several of my novels are concerned with Catholic hang-ups about sex and the loss of traditional faith. Malcolm enjoyed visiting empty village churches in the spirit of Philip Larkin’s poem ‘Church Going’, but had no religious belief. He cherished the values of secular liberal humanism, and his novels are often about liberal humanists who lack the strength to resist forces in society that are inimical to those values. If our ‘campus novels’ were sometimes confused in the memories of readers, and we were occasionally congratulated on writing each other’s books (a mistake difficult to correct graciously), that was partly because we drew on the same kind of experience, and found that we perceived the academic world with a similar sense of humour. Edith Wharton, writing in her memoirs about her friendship with Henry James, says, ‘The real marriage of true minds is for any two people to possess a sense of humour or irony pitched in exactly the same key, so that their joint glances at any subject cross like interarching search-lights.’ I often had that experience with Malcolm, long after he left Birmingham, when we heard in some senior common room or conference bar a remark or anecdote ripe with fictional possibilities, and our eyes would meet as if silently to say, ‘Toss you for it?’ But it was his influence and example that first encouraged me to develop an element of comedy which was present but subdued in my first two novels. I remember that in our very first conversation, he commented favourably on a parody in
The Picturegoers
of the bizarre names often listed in Hollywood film credits – a passage which I had regarded as an insignificant detail. Sometimes a remark like that from a source you respect can make you see your own work in an entirely new light.

Malcolm was already firmly established in the literary world when he arrived in Birmingham.
Eating People Is Wrong
had caused more of a stir than
The Picturegoers
, and he was a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines on a cultural spectrum that ran from
Punch
to the
Critical Quarterly.
His confident professionalism and readiness to turn his hand to any literary task, moving effortlessly from one stylistic register to another, impressed me and inspired emulation. I placed a few sketches in
Punch
myself, and in 1963 collaborated with Malcolm and a talented undergraduate in the Birmingham English Department, Jim Duckett, to write a satirical revue which would never have come into existence without Malcolm’s initiative. Jim Duckett, whom I had tutored in his first year, wrote, produced and performed in a student revue in his second year which impressed Malcolm and me. Malcolm invited John Harrison, the Artistic Director of the Birmingham Rep, whom he had known in Nottingham, to see it, and persuaded him to commission a revue from the three of us for the Rep’s autumn season. I have happy memories of hilarious script-writing sessions, Jim and I improvising as we paced up and down in Malcolm’s office while he pounded out our lines on an upright typewriter, improving them in the process. We finished off the script in the summer vacation at the rented cottage near Beverley in East Yorkshire which Malcolm and Elizabeth had retained after he left his job at Hull. The show, entitled
Between These Four Walls
, was a mixture of sketches and songs, inspired by
Beyond the Fringe
and the BBC’s TV programme
That Was The Week That Was.
It was generally well received, though box office takings never recovered from the assassination of President Kennedy halfway through its four-week run. We writers each received £40 for our contributions. It was not a negligible sum at that date, but the fascinating and instructive experience of sitting in a theatre and registering every nuance of an audience’s reaction to one’s words was far more valuable. I discovered in myself a zest for satirical, parodic and farcical writing which found its expression in my next novel,
The British Museum is Falling Down
, dedicated ‘To Malcolm Bradbury, whose fault it mostly is that I have tried to write a comic novel’. It was his favourite among my books.

Malcolm was always a great collaborator, and wrote an amusing account of his early enthusiasm for that form of literary composition, which was included in
Liar’s Landscape
. I do not know whether it was literally true that he and his friend Barry Spacks, whom he met at the University of Indiana on his first visit to America in 1955–6, would bash away simultaneously at their typewriters until one called out ‘Blocked!’ and then change places and continue each other’s stories, but it is a wonderful image, both sublime and ridiculous, of collaboration overcoming the frustrations and anxieties of the creative process.

Malcolm responded to the stimulus of other people’s ideas and could often see in them possibilities of which their originators were unaware, as I discovered shortly after he came to Birmingham. I had found in a local second-hand book shop a copy of a light romantic novel, by a completely forgotten novelist, published in 1915, called
Nymphet
. That is the familiar name given by the hero of the story to an eleven-year-old girl who facilitates his eventual union with his beloved. It is also of course the generic term applied by Humbert Humbert to the eponymous heroine of Vladimir Nabokov’s celebrated novel,
Lolita
, published forty years later, generally assumed to be the first use of this archaic word in modern fiction. It was possible, by close reading and interpretative ingenuity, to see beneath the innocent sentimental surface of
Nymphet
the unconscious representation of an adult man’s erotic attraction to a pre-pubescent girl, and to regard it therefore as some kind of precursor of Nabokov’s masterpiece. It seemed to be an idea worth writing up, and I accordingly did so, and sent my essay to a few magazines – without success. I showed it to Malcolm and he offered to rewrite it and split the fee if he placed it. Being hard up at the time, I agreed. Malcolm transformed my straightforward essay into a personal anecdotal piece in a humorous self-mocking style which he had honed in many contributions to
Punch
, and sold it under the title of ‘Nympholepsy’ to the American magazine
Mademoiselle
, which paid a great deal more than
Punch.
Pocketing my share, I was impressed by this achievement – and perhaps a little piqued. It was then that I began to write humorous journalistic pieces of my own. Malcolm had a pragmatic, professional commitment to writing which was contagious. It was this basic, inexhaustible appetite for the craft and business of writing which, among other qualities, made him in due course such an inspiring teacher of younger writers. And he was always thrifty with ideas, aware that they do not grow on trees. In 1988 I encountered ‘Nympholepsy’ once again, much elaborated, revised and updated, in a chapter of his
Unsent Letters
(1988).

Close friendships between writers have a special character, especially when they are formed fairly early in their careers, when both parties are developing their work, showing it to each other, discussing it, perhaps collaborating on it. The friendship of Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin was a classic example. Inevitably there is an element of competitiveness in such a relationship, which can cause some tension later, but at this early stage it is a constructive rivalry, as between two athletes specialising in the same events who train together. For three academic years, 1961–4, I enjoyed that kind of relationship with Malcolm continuously. We saw each other nearly every day at the university in term time, had offices on the same corridor, took coffee together in the senior common room and shared lunch in Staff House. There was always much to talk about: new books, new writing projects, departmental politics. It was a period of expansion and change in British universities, and the rather old-fashioned Birmingham syllabus was under revision, to make room, or more room, for areas of study in which Malcolm and I had an interest: modern English literature, American literature, literary theory. We started a seminar course for second- and third-year students called ‘Comparative Critical Approaches’ which we taught jointly. The name was coined by Richard Hoggart who was appointed as second Professor of English Literature the year after Malcolm arrived and founded the Centre for Contemporary Cultural Studies, initially a postgraduate programme within the English Department, which would create a whole new subject in British higher education. Not all the more senior members of staff were enchanted with these developments and department meetings could be long and contentious.

Our intimacy extended into social life, where Malcolm and Elizabeth soon became the principal friends and companions of Mary and myself, entertaining each other, going out to the cinema or the theatre and even, I recall, a black-tie staff dinner-dance, as one did in those days. They were better off than us – Malcolm, being older than me, was on a slightly higher salary, and was earning much more from his writing – and he owned a new VW Beetle, then a very trendy car, in which he drove us to the Royal Shakespeare Theatre in Stratford and other venues. He was a good, safe driver, and I remember him saying that it gave him great satisfaction because he had always been helpless and hopeless with anything mechanical. I envied him the car, and also the brand-new, centrally heated house he and Elizabeth bought in Edgbaston which compared favourably with the jerry-built two-bedroom inter-war semi we occupied in Selly Oak. But Malcolm’s encouragement and example gave me hope that I could raise our standard of living with my pen in ways I had not considered before.

Several post-war British novelists began their careers with a ‘day-job’ teaching in a university, but most of them gave it up as soon as they felt able to do so. Malcolm and I were unusual in being equally committed and ambitious in our academic and creative careers. This was partly because the life of a freelance writer simply seemed too risky, especially for a married man with a family (Mary and I had two children by 1962 and the Bradburys had their first the following year) but it was also because we were genuinely interested in the academic study of literature, and wanted to make our mark on it. So we set ourselves up for a very busy life, combining teaching, writing scholarly books and articles, with writing novels, short stories, and in due course scripts for stage, radio and TV, as well as doing a good deal of journalism, including regular reviewing of new fiction, which in the 1960s was usually done in batches of half a dozen books at a time. We would not have been able to maintain this tempo of work if we had not married on the pre-Women’s Lib assumption that the husband was the breadwinner whose work had priority and the woman the housewife and mother whose career was suspended during the early years of childbearing. It was symptomatic that I received the news that my second child, Stephen, had been born (four weeks earlier than expected) while attending a conference in London with Malcolm in the spring of 1962, and that when Elizabeth left the hospital with her first-born, Matthew, in the following year I drove her home in the clapped-out Ford Popular I had managed to acquire by then because Malcolm was away on some pre-arranged academic engagement.