The many worlds of Malcolm Bradbury

With the passing of Malcolm Bradbury, distinguished novelist, the British literary world has lost its leading cultural icon. A many-faceted personality who excelled in diverse fields, Bradbury's legacy will perhaps be best remembered for his unique ability to bridge the gap between popular and minority cultures, says SACHIDANANDA MOHANTY.

LAST July, I met Malcolm Bradbury at Cambridge, U.K. It was a high point in my career as a literary journalist. He was well dressed, suave, learned and articulate. A brilliant conversationalist, Bradbury's appeal clearly lay in his wit, urbanity and his inborn capacity to charm perfect strangers! A total opposite of the sterotypical Britisher, Bradbury was perhaps the best known public face of the British culture in the post-war years. Despite his rootedness to his own milieu, he was a true internationalist. Although he chose to remain in England, he served for the most past of his professional career as a Professor of American Literature.

What was the key to the Bradbury mystique that made him a one-man institution who rode the British Literary world as a colossus for many decades? He left his footprints in many areas. A literary genius of rare distinction who employed humour to expose social pretentions, Bradbury helped shape a new genre of fiction called the Campus Novel. Popular literature and culture then had a pariah status in the portals of the academia. They still do in many quarters today, alas!

It is hard to fix Malcolm Bradbury into any mould. Although an establishment figure, he was also an iconoclast and a true radical. Son of a railwayman, he never forgot his working class origins even when he was feted and received the coveted knighthood from the Queen. His vision of literature took him from the ivory tower of the pure discipline into the the world of cultural diplomacy. He travelled far and wide in former Eastern Europe and was in the first team that visited Mao's China after the Cultural Revolution. When literary men talked of the important role of the humanities in the contemporary world, Bradbury actually contributed to the promotion of peace and international understanding. He wrote columns in the leading papers of the world from New Statesman to New York Times and chaired coveted literary awards such as the Booker Prize. He wrote scripts for films, was the co-founder of one of the first courses in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, the first of its kind in the U.K.

Bradbury started writing in 1952. This was the time he was at the University thanks to a free grant from the State. He went to a college next to the University of London and used this as a setting for his first novel Eating people is wrong. The central character here was a Marxist when he was a student. He then gave up Marxism. "There were two key things," Bradbury told me, "one was campus as a place of social change and the other was teaching ideological and cultural values."

Many of Bradbury's other novels employ effectively the contemporary political backdrop. "The campus," he recalls, "no longer seemed to be a stage for such interesting stories." So he wrote Rates of Exchange about Eastern Europe during the time of the Coldwar; Dr. Criminals is about the period after the Cold War.

Although Bradbury is often associated with the novelist David Lodge, the latter has acknowledged his indebtness to his mentor. "Although my early writing had humour in it," Lodge told me, "it was not basically comical. It was Malcolm who encouraged me to write comedy. I have acknowledged him in The British Museum is Falling Down."

Bradbury wrote criticism and is distinguished by several critical works such as The Novel Today, The Social Context of Modern English Literature and The Modern American Novel.

Malcolm Bradbury's faith in the central role of literature in shaping a new social order perhaps stemmed from his deep commitment to humanistic values. He was aware of the changing profile of the University and the need to evolve a better self- image of the discipline of literature. Popularity or mass appeal can never go against literary greatness he felt. Indeed, he believed that the literary novelist or critic can ill-afford social isolation. However, social or political engagement is never easy. It did not mean toeing the party line or becoming an instrument for the powerful state for the enormous patronage it can bestow on the individual writer. One must always retain, he believed, the integrity of one's own being and speak out against all wrongs.

Bradbury had a soft corner for India. He regretted that illness had prevented a plan of his to visit the country. He had befriended many Indians writers in Cambridge and took special pride in recalling the role he played in bringing Salman Rushdie into limelight.

Malcolm Bradbury always evolved in his thinking and yet never subscribed to the view that "the latest is always the best." He had deep reservations about many aspects of post-structuralism, and disfavoured cultural relativism.

One always cherishes one's own brand of heroism and Malcolm Bradbury will remain my special hero! Activist and compassionate to the core (his last work To the Hermitage was published a few months ago) he demonstrated for half a century that literary values will always remain central to the human order.

Sachidananda Mohanty is a Professor of English Literature at the University of Hyderabad.

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