Reflections Another look at “The History Man” by Steve Morris

For me, the one beacon of light in a thor- ing spectacular hubris and a startling lack of oughly miserable MA was Malcolm Bradbury. self-awareness. I looked forward to his seminars, with him It’s no easy read. Written in the present tense puffing away on his pipe, being funny, and and featuring few adverbs and little comment taking a proper interest in his students. With on the characters’ interior lives, the book gives the Creative Writing masters program he co- the reader a snapshot of a particular moment founded, he was the star of the Literature de- in 1972, complete with swingers and Machia- partment. The writer of what became one of vellian plots at a new university somewhere the defining novels of the 1970s, The History on the south coast. It is oddly menacing and Man, he was often on television and added a ends with a suicide attempt and the good guys little stardust to the University of East Anglia, nowhere in sight. a new university up in the wilds of Norfolk. There are, of course, moments of dark hu- Or, as others called it, the arse-end of nowhere. mor, especially as Bradbury fillets the language Like many young people in the early 1980s, of sociology. Kirk arranges the food for a fate- I chose uea precisely because it was modern ful party, or as he has it, he creates “the loose and a bit experimental. Who wanted stuffy frame of reference surrounding this encounter.” old Oxford when you could have the con- But here’s the thing. I had intended to write crete mini-metropolis of a university birthed about the way Bradbury assassinates the new in ideals of being contemporary, modern, and university movement that was a major part comfortably radical? of my life. But as I read the book again and It’s now twenty years since Bradbury died spoke, for the first time in nearly forty years, to and time to wonder where we are with his my old lecturers who were there at the time, I troublesome, troubling, and sometimes bril- found the book far more profound than this. I liant novel—and whether it has finally run out realized Bradbury’s target isn’t really new uni- of steam. Reading it again, I’m struck that it versities at all—they are simply a convenient depicts a world so unfamiliar, so odd, that canvas. Professor Christopher Bigsby, a friend it’s hard to believe that it was ever like that. of Bradbury’s, tells me that “he liked uea for The History Man features a bunch of thor- its interdisciplinarity, its seminar teaching, oughly dislikeable and unsympathetic char- its commitment to American Studies, which acters, none more so than Howard Kirk, the meant an interest in the modern.” Bradbury of self-styled “theoretician of sociability,” radi- course forecasted the growth of the university cal sociology lecturer, and proto–television as business and the rise of managerialism—but personality. Kirk spouts revolution but acts this wasn’t his main focus. entirely in his own interests, fomenting trou- He is rather taking a potshot at a counter- ble, sleeping with all and sundry, and show- culture worldview that flourished briefly and

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was already fading from sight in the year the didn’t have a lot to say for themselves, and novel is set. The book is simply brilliant. they were poor. Kirk, his wife Barbara, and their circle are prime representatives of a 1960s radicalism The History Man captures a time in British that conflated Mao and Marx with free love. society when the bounds were broken and The end result was a Weltanschauung high on people began to wonder if they might make slogans and the taking of positions and low themselves anew. But what were the choices on personal responsibility and decency. What they faced, and was the new any better than makes the novel a little tragic is that the Kirks the old? This is where things become fascinat- in 1972 are facing, not very comfortably, the ing, and we need to understand the story of end of what had once looked like an inevitable Bradbury’s own life to make sense of it. march towards a workers’ utopia but instead Bradbury was born in 1932 in Sheffield. His was really moving towards all that was bour- father, Arthur, worked as a railway clerk, and geois. As Kirk’s career rises, he becomes more the family moved to London when Bradbury grandiose and selfish. was small. They lived in classic Metroland in If this were the novel’s only point, I doubt a new semi-detached house in Rayners Lane. it would still be read. But there is another di- The house cost £595 and was a statement mension that is intriguing and resonates today. of social mobility. Arthur, commuted into The majority of the novel is the story of a few work each day. The family later moved back weeks in the chaotic and ruinous life of the up North, and Bradbury attended grammar Kirks, but there are two chapters that delve school in Nottingham. He took a First at the back into the creation of this unholy couple. relatively new Leicester University. In 1970, he (Intriguingly, Christopher Hampton left these became Professor of English Studies at uea. out of his 1982 television adaptation.) He was never an Oxbridge sort. It is in these chapters that we begin to un- His life parallels that of Kirk, not least in lock the great center of Bradbury’s masterpiece that both had become that peculiarly 1970s and his personal story at the same time. How- thing—the television academic. But, of course, ard Kirk is caught on the horns of an impos- Bradbury made very different choices. His sible psychological dilemma. On the one hand, accessory was the tobacco pipe and not the he is the “History Man”—he believes that the Zapata moustache and T-shirt with a revolu- outcome of history is inevitable and that his tionary slogan. He was, in fact, quite conser- role is simply to hasten it along to its radical vative. He sent his sons to private schools; he conclusion. But on the other hand, he is also had private healthcare. But it’s only when we the product of his upbringing, as we all are. understand his abiding relationship with his He believes, as does Barbara, that it is possible beloved mother, Doris, that we see the ground completely to remake ourselves and to escape from which he grew and decided not to escape. where we came from. But Bradbury, it seems to His mother lived through nearly the whole me, wonders why on earth we would want to. of the twentieth century. She was born in We learn that the Kirks did not begin as 1898 and died in 1993. She stayed at home followers of fashionable causes and were and looked after the boys. She went to the not always the revolutionaries they consider library; she was intelligent but not educated. themselves now. Instead, they started in the Just two generations earlier, her grandmother upper-working-class, lower-middle-class mi- signed her name with a cross. The family went lieu of the North. They grew up in a society on holiday to Butlins, the affordable vacation that valued hard work, going to church, and provider. Doris and Arthur retired to a bun- basic decency. They went to selective grammar galow by the sea. schools. They went to the red-brick University Writing about her, Bradbury explained that of Leeds. Howard was shy and a virgin when he had a lifelong hatred of crowds and fads and he met Barbara. They were comfortingly con- wild enthusiasms. He had a love of common ventional and knew their own history. They sense and for people who took their moral

30 The New Criterion June 2020 Reflections responsibilities seriously. These keynotes, he funny and pointed things to say about health explains, were also his mother’s. He both in- and safety!” herited them and inhabited them. Howard Professor Bigsby tells me that Bradbury and Barbara Kirk could have taken just the wrote The History Man after becoming angry same values, but they didn’t. Although Kirk about a student sit-in at uea. The students would never have admitted it, he was a self- broke into his office, read his letters, and drank made man, which is surely the hallmark of the his sherry. It was poor form. Maybe his novel bourgeoisie that he so hated. is a statement about bad form more generally. Doris Bradbury, in contrast, was thoughtful, Bradbury had a window on the world, but modest, and considerate. Which is just what he was also unworldly. Like Chesterton, he Malcolm Bradbury was as well. These were the sometimes had to ring his wife when he was qualities, he said, that he looked for in others. lost and had forgotten where he was meant to The History Man is a novel of the choices be going. But he was loved by those around that we all face. What are we to be? him, even if they disagreed with him. When he was a child, Bradbury nearly died. Malcolm Bradbury felt, in the end, that he He had a hole in his heart and endured one of had been a bit hard on sociology, and perhaps the first corrective operations for that condition. he was. He certainly had great fun at the ex- He always felt he was on borrowed time, and pense of its language and assumptions. Perhaps his energy and boldness in speaking out may he was bit hard on the Kirks as well. Indeed, have come from his sense of the clock ticking. it’s difficult not to have a sneaking admiration I left uea and decided never to go back to for Howard Kirk, or at least for his brazenness. academia. I had become disillusioned about How does The History Man speak to us to- the study of literature. It seemed to me that day? Peering back into the world of the 1970s seeing literature through the prism of an ism— campus is a kind of time travel. We see people Marxism for instance—somehow killed it and who wouldn’t be saddled with student loans took me away from the reasons why I loved and would never have had to work in a call books. I wish I had known that Bradbury felt center or betting shop. Perhaps that’s why they the same way. Perhaps I would have felt a bit can be so free and easy. But I was there in the less lonely. 1980s, and things weren’t that much different. Professor Punter tells me: The revolution was always about to start—but preferably after closing time. Professor David I think that by 1975, when the book was pub- Punter, now at the University of Bristol, and lished, Malcolm was feeling embattled. A lot who knew Malcolm, tells me: of new staff at uea were interested in critical theory, and in those great bastions of what was I don’t honestly know whether the book has then considered new thinking—Marxism and much, or anything, to say to the universities now, psychoanalysis (feminism arrived a little later). or at least to students. After all, then it seemed He and others believed that this resulted in less possible in the wake of les événements in France attention to the literary text and to the qualities that knowledge, especially of the arts and social that make “great literature”—Harold Bloom, of sciences, could be a real engine for revolutionary course, later became the great beacon for this change. None of the students I have come across kind of thinking. in the last twenty years would have the least idea what I mean by that. And Bradbury, who became a knight of the realm, who grew up in Metroland and saw Professor Punter thinks that Bradbury might something fine in the everyday lives of people have turned his attention these days to univer- like his mother and father, challenged the new sity managerialism, which is at least equally orthodoxy too. He loved books and the char- threatening to the liberal values he espoused. acters they conjure. I think that’s a very good He tells me that “he might also have some reason to give his book another read.

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