- The Guardian,
- Wednesday November 29 2000
Malcolm Bradbury was my oldest and closest friend in the literary world. Our careers were so closely entwined, especially in the early years, that I feel as if some vital support has been cut away by his death which can never be replaced. We first met as young lecturers appointed to the English department of the University of Birmingham, I in 1960, he a year later. Bliss was it to be alive in that dawn of expansion in higher educa tion! We were both grammar-school scholarship boys from lower-middle-class backgrounds, non-Oxbridge, teaching modern English and American literature to eager students of similar social origins.
We had both published our first novels, though his (Eating People is Wrong) had caused more of a stir. He was also already well established as a humorist and literary critic. His confident professionalism and readiness to turn his hand to any literary task impressed me and inspired emulation. It was typical of his exceptional generosity of spirit that he actively encouraged me to work the vein of comedy that was his own forte, and in due course introduced me to his agent and his publisher. In 1963 he initiated a collaboration between the two of us and a gifted Birmingham under graduate, Jim Duckett (who died young) to write a Beyond the Fringe-type revue for the Birmingham Rep. I have happy memories of hilarious script-writing sessions, with Jim and me pacing up and down, while Malcolm pounded out and improved our lines on an upright typewriter. I'm not sure that writing was ever such fun again.
A single university department could hardly contain two satirical campus novelists indefinitely, and in the event it was Malcolm who moved, to the fresh fields and pastures new of the University of East Anglia, where he built a distinguished career as both professor of American studies and director of the phenomenally successful MA in creative writing. (I doubt if any such course in the world has seen a higher proportion of its graduates get their work published.)
Inevitably, we saw much less of each other, and regretted that, but it never affected the essential bond between us. We became in a way literary twins - sometimes farcically confused, always with a quick, intuitive sense of each other's thoughts and feelings.
As Bakhtin observed, all writers glance aside at their peers as they write, and it is Malcolm whom I most often evoke as imagined reader, to test the quality of the work. His masterpiece was The History Man, followed closely in my estimation by Rates of Exchange, but all his fiction will go on being read and relished for its witty and acute observation of contemporary life and thoughtful, sometimes dark insights into the plight of the liberal humanist in the modern and postmodern world.
Malcolm also produced an extraordinary range and quantity of writings in almost every other possible form; literary history and criticism, essays, parodies, travelogues, television and film scripts, stage plays, poems, anthologies and reviews. (He must have written over a thousand book reviews, and I never saw one that was malicious or destructive.)
Though he shared the high modernist belief in the importance of art and artistic experiment, he also enjoyed writing for a large popular audience on occasion, and took justifiable pride in having mastered the techniques appropriate to different media. In his last novel, To the Hermitage, he deftly spliced together a wry Shandean self-portrait with a vivid historical evocation of Diderot, whose encylopaedic intellectual energy he admired and whose disappointments stirred his sympathies. The last, elegiac section of that book is charged with deep personal feeling which now seems doubly poignant.
While producing this immense body of work Malcolm also did a great many other things in the fields of culture and education. Even after his retirement from UEA he lectured at home and abroad and attended conferences and sat on committees and awarded prizes. He found it difficult to say no to any invitation that concerned literature, or to stay away for long from the typewriter or computer keyboard. Those who loved him wished he would not tax himself so remorselessly, and wish so even more at his untimely death. But it was useless to protest. Writing was his life.
