posted on 06 Aug 2020

The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

When Malcolm Bradbury’s The History Man was published in 1975 it was something of a succès de scandale. Feminists were outraged by the predictable stereotyping that virtually all of the female characters seemed subject to; others were shocked by the novel’s cynicism; and yet others by its flat affectless prose, its solid blocks of lean almost adjectiveless description and reported speech. Every page is imprinted with an authorial voice that is “knowing, sardonic, and educated, but also detached, impersonal, opaque”, as David Lodge described it in a brilliant piece in the Guardian in 2008.

Bradbury’s earlier works (Eating People is Wrong, and Stepping Westwards), published in and to a large extent about the 1950s and the 1960s respectively, were by comparison far gentler works, indebted to Kingsley Amis’s Lucky Jim and William Cooper’s Scenes from Provincial Life. But The History Man is about the 70s (it is set very explicitly in 1972) and is altogether darker in tone, pricklier in character, and I suppose more modernist in its techniques. I don’t suppose I had read it in well over forty years, and so I picked it up over the weekend.

Although I had no very real recollection of the book, rereading it swiftly brought back very precisely the feeling I had when reading it in 1977, I suppose, probably when the paperback first came out. I remembered very clearly not just the novel itself but who I knew at that time, where I worked, why the book was considered important, and the kind of people who regarded it as important – indeed, it seemed to come loaded with the very texture of life as it was halfway through the 1970s. It was clever, dense with ideas, intimidating; it seemed a novel steeped somehow in its own sense of occasion.

The history man of the title is Dr Howard Kirk, lecturer in sociology – radical sociology, he would almost certainly add, for a sociology that isn’t radical has no place in a revolutionary’s arsenal – at the University of Watermouth, a thinly disguised University of East Anglia, where Bradbury himself taught the creative writing course. The Kirks – Howard and Barbara – are the very epitome of radical chic. Barbara is the mother of two children and profoundly dissatisfied both in her marriage and her diminished career prospects. Howard, resplendent in polo neck, leather safari jacket, denim cap and carefully tended Zapata moustache, is a serial philanderer, although of course this is elevated – by both the Kirks, as it happens – to the status of personal, political and sexual revolution, in keeping with the times.

But as Bradbury makes clear – and for my money this is one of the best bits of the book – the Kirks’ brilliant, zeitgeisty world-historical selves were not assumed fully-formed. They were respectable upper-working class graduates of the 1950s, grammar school children, as stifled and oppressed as any minority they might now champion the cause of. But following the souring of the 60s dream, the times called for people like the Kirks and the Kirks heeded that call and reinvented themselves.

The History Man cannot be faulted for its ambition. It takes the essentially cosy 50s-ish world of the ‘campus novel’ and places it on a world stage, charting the rise of the new universities, the rise of sociology and politics, and – at least as far as Howard Kirk is concerned – the emergence of a confident, cynical organisational class in the process of entrenching its own privileges and career prospects.

I was in my early-20s when I first read The History Man and I very much doubt that I was fully alive to its intentions or its ideas. I can’t have been.

Rereading it has been a curious experience. I can still see what intimidated me about the book. It is too clever by half, clearly intentionally so, and some passing acquaintance with its radical ideas is assumed. If like me, you aren’t university educated, it will probably convince you – if you need it – that you made the right choice. The characters it depicts are almost without exception repellent, and the university milieu is dreadfully realised (or seemed so to me all those years ago, and still seems so).

But what I hadn’t remembered are its many instances of clumsiness. Bradbury sometimes seems so intent on perfecting the relentless modernist sheen of its prose – the often flat dialogue (often funny but often very flat), the characters that sometimes seem little more than sociological cyphers (of course they do!), the insistence on the texture of the mundane, sometimes as finely grained as a 70s photojournalist’s picture of urban decay and emerging gentrification – that silly names, weak jokes, awful clichés and cheap parodies (especially in the case of female characters, as I mentioned) squeeze uncaught under the wire.

And while one expects its language of early-70s radicalism to sound dated, it should sound authentic, and it doesn't always. Sometimes it sounds clumsy and unconvincing: it frankly isn’t radical enough, it doesn't quite catch the flavour of radical jargon that prevailed; it comes across as learnt at secondhand.

The History Man was, according to David Lodge, one of the most influential novels of the 1970s. I think that might be overstating it somewhat: influential amongst a certain class and culture, yes, but I’m not certain it went beyond that target audience.

But was it widely enjoyed, I wonder? Howard Kirk would finger his Zapata moustache and sneer at someone thinking that novels should seek to be enjoyable. The History Man has more the feeling of something gritty and obdurate that one might inadvertently rub uncomfortably up against.

However, if you want a flavour of the very early-70s, and especially of academic life of that period, then give The History Man a try. There were times when I could almost taste and smell the 70s. It is a novel that has an undeniable power of a kind. But I have to say, my experience of rereading it was astonishingly close to what it was all those years ago: what it achieves it does with very little in the way of reading pleasure on offer. It remains an undeniably accomplished but uncomfortable period-piece, but I don't expect I will ever give it a third read.

 

Alun Severn

August 2020

 

 

Malcolm Bradbury elsewhere on Letterpress:

 

Eating People is Wrong