Lives in Writing (20 page)

Both Malcolm and I had grown up, like most of our generation, with a favourable image of America as our indispensable ally in the war, and as a land of greater affluence and opportunity than post-war Austerity Britain. In the 1960s its novelists seemed generally more innovative, and its academic critics more high-powered, than their British counterparts. Malcolm had spent two separate years in American universities before he came to Birmingham and he was planning to go back for another. What he said and wrote about America made me want to see it for myself. I applied for a Harkness Commonwealth Fellowship, a munificent scheme that no longer exists in the same form, which funded one or two years of study and travel in the United States for eligible candidates, and was lucky enough to be selected. In the late summer of 1964 I took a year’s leave of absence from Birmingham and embarked on the
Queen Mary
with Mary and our children, aged four and two, for New York. I was attached to Brown University in Providence, Rhode Island for a semester, and spent the summer in San Francisco; in between we drove slowly across the country from east to west, and more quickly back again afterwards. My project was to educate myself in American literature, which I had never formally studied, but I also managed to write most of
The British Museum is Falling Down
and a short monograph on Graham Greene while I was there. It was an amazingly liberating and fulfilling year for me, and also for Mary, though the kids, especially Stephen, were too young to get much out of it.

In that age before email, fax machines and direct-dialling international telephone connections, Malcolm and I communicated by airmail letters or economical aerogrammes. I wrote more frequently, being free of mundane academic duties, he more copiously when he did find time to do so. I kept most of his letters and as I write this I have in front of me what was probably the first one he sent after our departure from Birmingham, headed simply ‘Sunday’ but evidently written in October 1964, which covers more than five sides of flimsy yellow quarto in single-spaced typescript. It begins with two pages of departmental news and gossip, then ‘on the literary front, plenty of news too’. He had delivered his new novel,
Stepping Westward
, to Secker & Warburg and ‘they were very pleased with it and . . . have offered what seems a much better advance – four hundred pounds . . .’ It was to be published in the spring. ‘They also want me to rewrite the Expatriates for them’ (this was his PhD thesis) and ‘
Eating People
is going into its third Penguin edition’. His short book on Evelyn Waugh was coming out from Oliver & Boyd and he would send me a copy. He was delighted by my news that Doubleday had taken my second novel
Ginger, You’re Barmy
for publication in America. He was planning another novel himself, and Bryan Wilson (a sociologist friend) had asked him to write a book for sixth-formers on the social background to literature (which he did in due course). Meanwhile ‘I’ve done three scripts for
Swizzlewick –
a very interesting experience.’ This was a twice-weekly BBC TV comedy drama series about the local council of a fictional Midlands town, created by the local playwright David Turner who had recently had a hit with a stage play called
Semi-Detached.
Turner wrote the first series, which had a mixed reception and aroused the ire of Mrs Whitehouse; some other writers including Malcolm were co-opted to contribute to a second series.

The letter continued with proposals for my collaboration in new projects. The first was something called
Uncle Harvey
, of which I now retain no memory. It was evidently to be a kind of highbrow satirical radio revue for the Third Programme written by Malcolm, Jim Duckett (who had now graduated and was working as John Harrison’s assistant at the Rep) and me, drawing on other writers like David Turner occasionally. Each programme would have a different theme, and Uncle Harvey was to be a linking character and presenter. Discussions with the BBC had gone well but they wanted to make a trial programme before committing themselves. (This programme, on the subject of British politics, written without my participation, was recorded in Birmingham, but nothing came of the project.) Malcolm reported that the script of
Between These Four Walls
had been sent to Ned Sherrin, producer of
That Was The Week That Was
, without eliciting any response, but John Harrison wanted us to do another revue for the Rep in the spring of 1963 – ‘What do you think?’ I didn’t think I could collaborate at such a long distance, but the show, called
Slap in the Middle
, with additional input from David Turner, was postponed till the autumn of that year and I did contribute some material to it. I had been publishing some humorous pieces in American magazines and Malcolm asked me to keep them in a file so he could read them in due course, and he added as an afterthought: ‘Oh, I have a piece coming up in
Mademoiselle
. . . You might see it!’

This letter gives some idea of Malcolm’s extraordinary range of interests as a writer, his energy in pursuing them, and his infectious enthusiasm for collaboration, all qualities which made him such a stimulating friend to other writers. To my mind he often wasted his time on projects which had little hope of coming to fruition and some of which would bring him little money or prestige even if they did. But that was the way he worked: he liked to have lots of projects going at the same time and would drop them and pick them up again as circumstances dictated or allowed. More than thirty years passed before Secker finally published the book on American literary expatriates.

The last two paragraphs of the letter throw light on other aspects of his character. In the penultimate one he comments pessimistically on the result of the recent general election in England, which was won by Labour under Harold Wilson’s leadership with a very narrow majority, after thirteen years of Tory government. I was surprised to be reminded of how right-wing Malcolm’s views were, especially on education. ‘I’m very miserable they got in,’ he wrote. ‘I’ve no doubt that if they stay in office long enough they’ll ruin English universities . . . I feel the educational system will come in for a hell of a beating. Already in Bristol they are doing a great levelling act, cutting out the Direct Grant Schools.’ Mary and I voted Labour and approved of comprehensive education, in which she had worked as a teacher, but this difference did not disturb our friendship with the Bradburys. I’m fairly sure he voted Liberal, not Conservative, in the ’64 election, and later he was a vocal supporter of the SDP during its brief political life – as I was, less publicly. Ideologically he was a lower-case conservative, cherishing tradition, hierarchy, and moral principle. In the final paragraph of this letter he charmingly caricatured himself in this respect:

We are having a delightful time with Matthew, and the summer in Lockington was particularly enjoyable. I am growing quite doting; but then he is not either rebellious or sinful. I keep telling him about decent living, the high moral life, and respecting his father, and am encouraging him to go in for the church. Piety, piety I cry. I hope it works.

In February 1965 I received disturbing news from Malcolm. He was being headhunted by the new University of East Anglia at Norwich, who were luring him with the prospect of early promotion to Senior Lecturer and the chance to head and design an American Studies programme from scratch, and he was obviously tempted, though deeply divided, by the offer. He wrote: ‘I’m in a state of great indecision: one thing it makes me realise is how attached I am to Birmingham, and how if I went I’d miss you.’ I felt exactly the same, and wrote a letter setting out a number of reasons why he should stay in Birmingham, the final one being that he was a conservative as regards education and would be unhappy in an institution dedicated (as the ‘New Universities’ of that era were) to radical innovation in teaching the humanities. At the end of March, however, just as we were about to leave Providence, we heard that Malcolm had accepted UEA’s offer. He told me long afterwards that on the day when he had promised to respond to it he went out with two letters in his pockets, one saying yes and one saying no, and posted the latter; but the next day UEA rang him up and said, ‘You don’t really mean it, do you?’ and he agreed that he didn’t. Malcolm hated to say no to anybody, as many people – literary editors, British Council officers, conference convenors, and secretaries of literary societies – discovered to their advantage.

I wrote back, only slightly exaggerating the note of grief. ‘Oh Malcolm, how could you do it? How could you turn your back on Brum and us? We’re really very desolated that you won’t be there when we get back.’ Communication was interrupted during our long trek west, and it wasn’t until May that I received from Malcolm a fuller account of the matter and his fluctuating feelings about it. Apparently Richard Hoggart had suggested to Terence Spencer that he should see if Birmingham could match Norwich’s offer with something comparable, and Spencer, after seeming receptive to the idea, had finally failed to act on it. ‘This very complicated situation has involved us in all kinds of doubts, anguish and uncertainty, and is half a reason for our excessive silence, since in a way I was hoping that I’d still be in Birmingham after all. I shall feel particularly depressed about not having your day-to-day company. This won’t mean that we won’t see each other, obviously, but less often, and not teaching together, which will be a great loss.’

And of course we did continue to see each other at regular intervals over the years that followed, sometimes on academic occasions, sometimes on visits with wives and children. We had a two-family holiday in Brittany together in 1967, and much later a touring holiday without children in the same part of France. When Malcolm and Angus Wilson (who had a part-time post at UEA) started the MA course in creative writing there, which under Malcolm’s direction would become the most successful of its kind in the country, I was its first external examiner. (There was only one student that year, Ian McEwan. I wish I could say I instantly recognised his genius, but I didn’t, though I did pass him, complaining of the scruffy state of his manuscripts.) In 1977 Malcolm encouraged me to apply for the Henfield Fellowship in creative writing at UEA which was associated with the MA course, and I spent a summer term there writing part of
How Far Can You Go?
, living in a little maisonette on campus and occupying Malcolm’s office, as he was on sabbatical leave. Since he was working at home I saw a good deal of him and spent every Sunday with the family. And for twenty years or more we would meet every July at the British Council Seminar in Cambridge, previously mentioned, at which I was a regular guest speaker, as was Malcolm himself after he handed over the chairmanship to his friend and colleague at UEA, Christopher Bigsby.

There were fewer reasons to tempt Malcolm to revisit Birmingham, but among them was television. He was one of the first English literary novelists to embrace the medium enthusiastically, and he kept faith with it throughout his career, in spite of many frustrations and disappointments. The BBC’s Drama Department at Pebble Mill in Birmingham was a centre of innovative production until it was phased out at the turn of the century; Malcolm had made contacts with the people who worked there when he lived in the city and maintained them after he left. The first fruit of this association was a ‘Play for Today’ broadcast in January 1975 called
The After Dinner Game
which he wrote (characteristically) in collaboration with Chris Bigsby. It was a studio play, as most TV drama was in those days, rehearsed like a stage play and then recorded on video by a multi-camera method in twenty-minute ‘takes’, which had to be aborted and done again from the beginning if anyone fluffed their lines. I went along to Pebble Mill at Malcolm’s invitation to watch this tense, complicated, collaborative operation, impressed by, and a little envious of, his involvement in it. The experience kindled in me a desire to get involved myself one day, though it was many years before that came to pass, by which time TV drama had become less theatrical and more filmic, and Malcolm had demonstrated his professional mastery of the medium in numerous original plays, mini-series, and adaptations. Like every writer who works in television and film, he wrote many scripts that were never produced, but he was exceptionally unlucky with the adaptation of his own novel,
Rates of Exchange
, which the BBC commissioned him to write as a six-part serial. Two weeks before principal photography was due to begin (on location in Hungary) when it was, of course, fully cast, and several hundreds of thousands of pounds had already been spent on it, the project was cancelled because of a dispute, or crisis, over budgeting in the BBC’s Drama Department. Only someone who has been professionally involved in television drama, and knows how difficult it is to get a major serial ‘green-lighted’ for production, and has some idea of how much rewriting of the screenplay is demanded even after that point has been reached, can begin to imagine the depth of Malcolm’s disappointment. Many writers would have given up the medium in disgust, but he persevered with it, pausing only to relieve his feelings in a satirical novella,
Cuts
(1987)
.

It is clear from our correspondence in 1965 that we both genuinely mourned our separation, and if I had been in Birmingham at the time I would undoubtedly have done more to persuade Malcolm to stay there. But in retrospect it was obviously essential for our individual development as writers that we should separate. One department could hardly contain two novelists writing satirical academic novels, and it was necessary that we should have different experiences to draw on for them.
Changing Places
and
The History Man
both appeared in the same year, 1975, and both were about the same basic phenomenon – the global radicalisation of universities in the late 1960s/early 1970s – but observed in very different places and fictionalised in quite different ways. I was right in predicting that Malcolm would find aspects of the radical ethos of UEA uncongenial, but that was precisely what provoked his masterpiece,
The History Man.
Like Evelyn Waugh, whose work he admired enormously, Malcolm’s imagination responded with gleeful relish to the things in contemporary society he found most alien, extreme and absurd.