Lives in Writing (21 page)

Changing Places
was inspired by an appointment as Visiting Associate Professor at the University of California in Berkeley in the first half of 1969, a time when it was a key site of the student revolution and 1960s’ counter-culture. I was determined to make use of this material in a novel, but conscious that several novels had already been published about visiting Englishmen having transforming experiences in American universities, not least Malcolm’s
Stepping Westward
(1965), in which a provincial British novelist called James Walker is writer-in-residence at a campus in the middle of America and proves ill-equipped to read the political plot in which he becomes involved. Pondering how to find some new angle on this transatlantic rite of passage, it occurred to me that there had been no novels about American academics visiting British universities, though this was not uncommon in those days, usually through an exchange scheme. That was how the binary structure of
Changing Places
– two professors, one English and one American, having parallel adventures in each other’s habitats – evolved, partly out of the need to differentiate my work from Malcolm’s.

To my surprise and disappointment the novel was turned down by three publishers before Malcolm, who had read it with appreciation, recommended that I send it to his own publisher, Tom Rosenthal at Secker & Warburg. We already had the same literary agent, Graham Watson of Curtis Brown, to whom Malcolm had introduced me soon after we first met, and he acted on Malcolm’s suggestion. Tom Rosenthal accepted the novel, subject to some reduction in length. When it was published it received a royal flush of good reviews and my fortunes as a novelist improved dramatically. I have published my novels with Secker (now Harvill Secker) ever since. Many authors would have hesitated to encourage a writer-friend whose work in various ways inevitably competed with theirs to join their own publisher’s list, but Malcolm’s helpful gesture was typically generous and unselfish. In the late autumn of 1975 Tom Rosenthal told us he had been informed by the
Yorkshire Post
that they had narrowed the choice for their annual Fiction Prize to
Changing Places
and
The History Man.
When my novel won Malcolm’s disappointment must have been sharpened by the irony that he had been instrumental in getting it published, but he never exhibited any hard feelings. It was a minor prize, only £150 in value, but it was a first for me and would have been for him. Happily a few months later he received the Royal Society of Literature’s Heinemann Award for
The History Man.
Neither novel, incidentally, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize that year, when the judges decided that only two novels instead of the usual six were worthy of the honour. One of the judges was Angus Wilson, who told Malcolm privately that he had felt unable to argue for
The History Man
because they were colleagues at UEA, but it is more probable that he disliked the book’s take on contemporary culture.

In the next decade the Booker Prize became much more important in determining rewards and reputations – some would say excessively so. From 1980 onwards the choice of the winner was postponed until the day of the banquet at which it was announced, an event covered live on television. These developments allowed bookmakers to accept bets on the result and converted the event into a kind of literary Oscar night, steeply raising its public profile. In 1981 Malcolm was chairman of the panel that awarded the prize to Salman Rushdie for
Midnight’s Children
(though he told me his own preference was for D.M. Thomas’s
The White Hotel
). The following year he was shortlisted for his own novel,
Rates of Exchange
, about an English academic’s adventures on a British Council lecture tour in an imaginary East European country under communist rule called Slaka. A few days before the banquet I sent him a postcard wishing him good luck, a picture of James Joyce as a young man looking quizzically into the lens of the camera. (When asked what he was thinking at that moment Joyce said he was wondering if the photographer would lend him five shillings.) The prize, however, went to J.M. Coetzee for
Life & Times of Michael K
. I phoned Malcolm next day to commiserate, and he said to me at the end of the conversation, in a tone at once encouraging and wistful, ‘Now it’s your turn’, knowing that I would have a new novel out next year.
Small World
, a carnivalesque romance about the international conference scene, was indeed shortlisted in 1984, when the surprise winner was Anita Brookner, for
Hotel du Lac
. At the end of my story, which was set in 1979, most of the characters are brought together at the huge annual convention of the American Modern Language Association in New York, and I contrived a brief Hitchcockian appearance in these pages for Malcolm and myself at a VIP cocktail party. The young hero of the tale overhears in the throng ‘a shortish, dark-haired man . . . talking to a tallish dark-haired man smoking a pipe. “If I can have Eastern Europe,” the tallish man was saying in an English accent, “you can have the rest of the world.” “All right,” said the shortish man, “but I daresay people will still get us mixed up.”’

And of course they did. I was once telephoned in my Birmingham office by a man who asked me to settle a bet that I was the same person as Malcolm Bradbury. Letters were often addressed to me at the University of East Anglia, including one from the Rupert Murdoch Professor of Communications at Oxford. We were interviewed together by a German radio journalist at some British Council event in Hamburg and I vividly remember the panic on her face as she realised halfway through that she had mixed up our identities. Writing about this incident in a newspaper column I said we were in danger of becoming the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of contemporary English letters. The continual confusion was amusing but also exasperating. In spite of generic resemblances between some of our novels, it seemed to us that most of them were quite distinct in technique and thematic preoccupations.

When
Nice Work
was shortlisted for the Booker prize in 1988, Malcolm was among the distinguished guests at the final banquet who, as they arrived at the Mansion House, were quizzed on live television about who should or would win, and I watched a video-recording of the event next day, in a hungover and somewhat despondent mood induced by having been a runner-up once again. Tall and handsome in his dinner jacket, Malcolm said with a smile, ‘For love and friendship, I hope it’s David Lodge’, for which I blessed him, knowing that such an outcome would have revived the hurt of his own disappointment five years earlier. The element of rivalry which was always inevitably present in our relationship had by now become a potential threat to its stability, and we preserved our friendship by surrendering some of the intimacy of the early years. We no longer discussed our writing plans in detail or showed each other work in progress or gave detailed critiques of the novels when they were published, limiting ourselves to supportive expressions of general approval. I think we both wished to avoid getting too close to each other’s work, perhaps being influenced by it through knowing too much about it, and thus encouraging the people who insisted on pairing us together or confusing us with each other. But this is not to say that influence ceased. As Mikhail Bakhtin observed, all writers glance sideways at their peers as they write, and it was Malcolm whom I most often invoked as imagined reader and critic, to test the quality of the work.

Our last collaboration, if it can be called that, was a Foreword/Afterword I wrote for a characteristic production of Malcolm’s,
My Strange Quest for Mensonge: Structuralism’s Hidden Hero
published by Secker in 1987. This started life as an article published in the
Observer
on 1 April 1984, which described a seminally important text called
La Fornication comme acte culturel
by an obscure French literary intellectual called Henri Mensonge, parodying and travestying the jargon of Continental literary theory in the process. It fooled a considerable number of readers, who failed to notice that the surname means ‘lie’ in French. Later Malcolm developed it into a short book and Tom Rosenthal asked if I would write an appropriate Foreword or Afterword. I wrote it in the persona of Michel Tardieu, the French Professor of Structuralist Narratology who was a character in
Small World.
He finds the identity of the nominal author of the book as suspiciously elusive as its subject:

There is a suggestive consonance between the syllables ‘Bradbury’ and ‘Bunbury’, perhaps the most famous
alias
in the pages of English literature, which persuades me that the name is a floating signifier that has attached itself to many discrete signifieds: Bradbury the campus novelist, Bradbury the Professor of American Studies, Bradbury the Booker Prize judge, Bradbury the TV adapter of postmodernist novelists like John Fowles and Tom Sharpe, Bradbury the tireless international conference-goer and British Council Lecturer. Even within those disparate categories there is doubt and difficulty in establishing the facts – many British readers, for instance, being convinced that the novels of Malcolm Bradbury are written by David Lodge, and
vice versa.

I had been a half-time professor at Birmingham since 1984, and around the time that
Mensonge
was published I took early retirement from my post at Birmingham to become a full-time freelance writer. Malcolm carried on at UEA as Professor of American Studies till 1995, but with reduced duties, concentrating increasingly on the MA programme in creative writing, which by now commanded tremendous prestige, and continuing to appear in all the guises listed by Tardieu. Each of us decided at about the same time to steer our narrative writing in a new direction, and we took the same generic route: the biographical novel about a classic writer. My
Author, Author
was written after Malcolm’s death, but I first made a note about the relationship between Henry James and George Du Maurier as a possible subject for a novel in 1995, before I discovered that Malcolm was writing a novel about Denis Diderot, the French encyclopaedist, versatile man of letters and prominent figure of the Enlightenment, whose wide-ranging intellectual energy Malcolm admired, and whose disappointments stirred his sympathies. As soon as
To the Hermitage
was finished he began to plan a novel about Chateaubriand’s visit to America in 1791–2, a fragment of which gave
Liar’s Landscape
its title; and after writing
Author, Author
I decided to write a novel about H.G. Wells. Our earlier novels had all been set in our own lifetimes. We were, of course, part of a cultural trend: towards the end of the last century and in the first decade of the present one an increasing number of literary novelists published books which applied the techniques of fiction to the life stories of past writers. But it is interesting that we were both attracted quite independently to this kind of project at the same stage of our careers. And different as they are,
To the Hermitage
and
Author, Author
have some features in common: both end with the death of the main character, and both contain reflections on what Malcolm’s narrator calls ‘Postmortemism’ – whether, for instance, the life of books after their authors’ deaths compensates for the disappointments and frustrations of a literary vocation, or indeed for the irreducible fact of death itself. In
To the Hermitage
this theme is explored in a variety of ways, including a number of humorous anecdotes about the bizarre or mysterious fates of the actual corpses of writers such as Descartes, Voltaire and, most importantly, Lawrence Sterne. The author of
Tristram Shandy
and
A Sentimental Journey
was as much a source of inspiration for Malcolm’s book as Diderot, for he spliced together a rambling, digressive, Shandean narrative of his own pilgrimage to St Petersburg in 1993, with an account of Diderot’s residence there as the guest of Catherine the Great in 1773–4.

To the Hermitage
was published in the early summer of 2000. Its moving conclusion, describing Diderot’s decline and death on his return to Paris, acquired an additional poignancy for readers from Malcolm’s death in November of the same year. The new millennium had begun well for him with the bestowal of a knighthood, but that was quickly overshadowed by illness and the diagnosis of a rare respiratory disease which did not respond to the usual treatment. He struggled to carry out the programme of events arranged that summer to promote
To the Hermitage
, and had to cancel several of them, his misery increased by some wounding reviews of the novel. (Malcolm himself published hundreds of reviews in his life, and I don’t remember ever reading a destructive one.) When I saw him in October he was confined to a bed that had been set up in his study, and deeply depressed. He said ‘I’m beginning to think I’m not going to get over this’, and although of course I demurred, I was not confident that he would. Imagining how enviably happy and healthy I must seem to him, and how I would feel in his situation, I pitied him from the bottom of my heart. His condition rapidly deteriorated and on 27 November he died in a hospice, with Elizabeth and their two sons beside him. The news was a shock to the literary world, for, by his own wish, few people had been made aware of how ill he was.

There was a private funeral early in December, and a memorial service in Norwich Cathedral in February of the new year attended by 500 people, an indication of how sadly Malcolm was missed by friends, colleagues and collaborators in many different walks of life. I spoke on that occasion, and I concluded my address with these words:

Another writer-friend gave me a diary at the beginning of last year, with a hand-written passage or sketch by a writer or artist on every page. The passage for the day of Malcolm’s funeral, Monday 4th December, had in one sense an uncanny appropriateness. It was contributed by the Irish novelist Brian Moore, who must have written it not long before his own death, and it was a quotation from Roland Barthes’ essay on Chateaubriand. As many of you will know, Malcolm was working on a novel about Chateaubriand when he died. The quotation is: ‘Memory is the beginning of writing and writing is, in its turn, the beginning of death.’ But if I understand that correctly – and Barthes is an elusive writer – I don’t really agree with it. It has always seemed to me that writing is a kind of defiance of death, because our books live on after we have gone. Certainly the greatest consolation we have for Malcolm’s passing is that we can re-experience his company, his character, and his life-enhancing sense of fun, through his books. But that is not the same, of course, as a living, breathing, laughing friend.