Bradbury, Malcolm - The History Man.txt Read online

  Malcolm Bradbury

  THE HISTORY MAN

  First published in 1975

  To Matthew and Dominic

  Author's Note

  This fiction is for Beamish, whom, while en route for some conference or other, I last saw at Frankfurt airport, enquiring from desk to desk about his luggage, unhappily not loaded onto the same plane as he. It is a total invention with delusory approximations to historical reality, just as is history itself. Not only does the University of Watermouth, which appears here, bear no relation to the real University of Watermouth (which does not exist) or to any other university; the year 1972, which also appears, bears no relation to the real 1972, which was a fiction anyway; and so on. As for the characters, so-called, no one but the other characters in this book knows them, and they not well; they are pure inventions, as is the plot in which they more than participate. Nor did I fly to a conference the other day; and if I did, there was no one on the plane named Beamish, who certainly did not lose his luggage. The rest, of course, is true.

  'Who's Hegel?'

  'Someone who sentenced mankind to history.'

  'Did he know a lot? Did he know everything?'

  --Günter Grass

  I

  Now it is the autumn again; the people are all coming back. The recess of summer is over, when holidays are taken, newspapers shrink, history itself seems momentarily to falter and stop. But the papers are thickening and filling again; things seem to be happening; back from Corfu and Sete, Positano and Leningrad, the people are parking their cars and campers in their drives, and opening their diaries, and calling up other people on the telephone. The deckchairs on the beach have been put away, and a weak sun shines on the promenade; there is fresh fighting in Vietnam, while McGovern campaigns ineffectually against Nixon. In the chemists' shops in town, they have removed the sunglasses and the insect-bite lotions, for the summer visitors have left, and have stocked up on sleeping tablets and Librium, the staples of the year-round trade; there is direct rule in Ulster, and a gun-battle has taken place in the Falls Road. The new autumn colours are in the boutiques; there is now on the market a fresh intra-uterine device, reckoned to be ninety-nine per cent safe. Everywhere there are new developments, new indignities; the intelligent people survey the autumn world, and liberal and radical hackles rise, and fresh faces are about, and the sun shines fitfully, and the telephones ring. So, sensing the climate, some people called the Kirks, a well-known couple, decide to have a party.

  The Kirks have, in fact, had a party at just this time of the year--the turning-point when the new academic year starts, new styles are in, new faces about, new ideas busy--for the past three autumns; and, if it had been anyone else but the Kirks, you might have said it was a custom or tradition with them. But the Kirks are very fresh and spontaneous people, who invest in all their activities with high care and scruple, and do nothing just because it has been done before; indeed they are widely understood not to have such things as customs and traditions. If the Kirks happen to have thought of a party, well, they have thought of it innocently, afresh, and from a sense of need. Evolving time signals mysteriously to those who are true citizens of it; the Kirks are true citizens of the present, and they take their messages from the prevailing air, and answer them with an honest sense of duty. They are, after all, very busy people, with many causes and issues, many meetings and conspiracies, many affairs and associations to attend to; indeed they are very lucky to catch each other in like mind, very lucky to catch each other at the same time in the same house at all. But they do know a need when they see one, and here they are, together in their own kitchen, and the idea comes, it is not clear from whom, above all, in fact, from the force of the times. Their eyes brighten, as they always do when such news comes; they say yes to each other; they set to work at once on the who, what and how of it. Howard, because he is nearest, leaves their bright pine kitchen, and goes out into the hall, to fetch, from beside their busy telephone, their busy house diary, a crucial text and record for people like themselves. They put the book between them on the kitchen table, and open it; they inspect the long, predictive tale of doings and undoings it unfolds, the elaborate, contingent plot of the days ahead of them. 'When?' says Barbara. 'Soon,' says Howard. 'Are we free on the first day of term?' asks Barbara. It is improbable, but Howard turns the pages; there is the day, Monday 2 October, and the evening is a blank. It is almost an omen; and from his inside pocket Howard takes out, at once, his pen. He holds the diary open; he writes, in his neat little hand, as if writing the start of some new story, which in a sense is what it is, the word 'Party' in the small space of white on the crowded page.

  The Kirks have had parties at this time of year before, they recall, and they know a lot of people will come; they are, after all, a very well-known couple. Howard is a sociologist, a radical sociologist, a small, bright, intense, active man, of whom you are likely to have heard, for he is much heard of. He is on television a good deal, and has written two well-known and disturbing books, urging new mores, a new deal for man; he has had a busy, literary summer, and a third book is on its way. He also writes articles in the papers, and he lectures at the local new university, a still expanding dream in white concrete, glass, and architectural free form, spreading on a hillside just to the west of, and just outside, the south-western sea-coast town in which they live. The university, having aspirations to relevance, has made much of sociology; and it would be hard to find anyone in the field with a greater sense of relevance than Howard. His course on Revolutions is a famous keystone, just as are, in a different way, his interventions in community relations, his part in the life of the town. For Howard is a well-known activist, a thorn in the flesh of the council, a terror to the selfish bourgeoisie, a pressing agent in the Claimants' Union, a focus of responsibility and concern. As for Barbara, well, she is at this minute just a person, as she puts it, trapped in the role of wife and mother, in the limited role of woman in our society; but of course she, too, is a radical person, and quite as active as Howard in her way. She is, amongst her many competences and qualifications, _a cordon bleu_ cook, an expert in children's literature, a tireless promoter of new causes (Women for Peace, The Children's Crusade for Abortion, No More Sex for Repression). And she, too, is a familiar figure, in the streets, as she blocks them with others to show that traffic is not inevitable, and in the supermarkets, as she leads her daily deputation to the manager with comparative, up-to-the-minute lists showing how Fine Fare, on lard, is one pence up on Sainsbury's, or vice versa. She moves through playgroups and schools, surgeries and parks, in a constant indignation; she writes, when it is her turn, for the community newspaper. When you visit the Kirks, there is always a new kind of Viennese coffee-cake to eat, and a petition to sign. And, as for the Kirks together, the well-known couple, they are a familiar pair in the high-rise council flats, going up and down in the obscenity-scrawled Otis lifts, hunting out instances of deprivation to show the welfare people, of careless motherhood to take to the family planning clinic; in the council offices, where they throw open doors behind which officials sit to thrust forward, in all their rebuking and total humanity, the fleshed-out statistic, the family that has not had its rights, not had just benefits, not been rehoused; and in the town in general, raising consciousness, raising instructive hell. The Kirks are active in the world as it is, in all its pathetic contingency; but they have higher hopes yet. They wake each morning and inspect the sky meticulously for dark hands, thunderbolts, white horsemen: evidence that the poor reality they so seriously tend has at least been wonderfully transformed, a new world, a new order, come overnight.

  But in the meantime they
go on, together and separately. They have been married now for twelve years, though you wouldn't think it, to look at them, to see them, to hear them in action. They have produced, by prophylaxis, two children, bright, modern creatures, both now of school age, of whom they are reasonably fond. They live together in a tall, thin, stuccoed Georgian house, which is in a slum-clearance area right in the middle of the town. It is an ideal situation for the Kirks, close to the real social problems, the beach, the radical bookshop, the family planning clinic, the macrobiotic food store, the welfare offices, the high-rise council flats, and the rapid ninety minute electric train service up to London, close, in short, to the stuff of ongoing life. From time to time, being passionate, liberated, consciousness-conscious people, they live apart, or with someone else, for a spell. But these always seem mature, well-thought interludes and infidelities, expressing their own separate individuality without disturbing their common Kirkness, and so somehow they always manage to be back together again within the month, and hence to seem, in the eyes of their friends, and presumably in their own eyes as well, a settled, but not an absurdly settled, couple. For the Kirks always generate excitement, curiosity. They are experimental people, intimates with change and liberation and history, and they are always busy and always going.

  They look the way new people do look, this autumn. Howard, small, dark, and compact, has long hair, though not quite so long as it was last year, and a Zapata moustache; he wears neat white sweatshirts, with rousing symbols on the front, like clenched fists, and hairy loose waistcoats, and pyjama-style blue jeans. Barbara, who is big and has frizzled yellow hair, wears green eyeshadow, and clown-white makeup, and long caftan dresses, and no bra, so that her stubby nipples show through the light cotton. Howard's two books being now staple radical documents in that expanding market, their jeans and caftans are rather more expensive than those of most of the people they know. But it is invisible expense, inconspicuous unconsumption, and it creates no distances and makes them no enemies, except for the enemies who were always their enemies. The Kirks are very attractive, very buoyant, very aggressive people, and, even if you dislike or distrust them, or are disturbed by them (and they mean to be disturbing), very good company.

  After the instinct about the party comes to them, an instinct so harmonious that neither one of them can now remember which of the two of them thought of it first, the Kirks go down to Howard's study, which is in the basement of their Georgian terrace house, and pour themselves some wine, and start to work on what Howard calls 'the loose frame of reference surrounding this encounter'. There are two studies in the Kirk house, though it is a very unstructured house, the opposite of the kind of thing people call a home: Howard's, downstairs, where he writes books, and Barbara's, upstairs, where she means to. Howard's study is lined with bookshelves; the bookshelves are filled with sociology texts, books about encounter groups and interpersonal relations, new probes into radical experience by American visionaries, basic political manifestos. Under the window is a white desk, with a second telephone on it; on the desk lies a fluttering pile of paper, the typescript of the book-which is called _The Defeat of Privacy_--that Howard has been working on over the recess and withdrawal of the summer, the recess that is now ending. The grilled window over the desk looks out onto a basement yard, with an untended plant tub in it; you must look upwards to see the railings onto the street. Back through the grilled windows comes in the sun that has been shining all day, a weak, late-year sun that slants in and composes square shapes on the bookcases and the walls. On the walls, between the bookcases, there are African masks, faces in black and dark brown carved wood set against white emulsion. The Kirks, in their bright clothes, sit beneath the masks, in two low white canvas chairs. They each hold their glass of red wine, and they look at each other, and they begin to talk the party into existence. They name names, they plan food and drink.

  After a while Barbara rises, and goes to the bottom of the stairs. 'Anne,' she shouts up into the hall, 'Howard and I are planning a party. I wonder if you'd give the children a bath?'

  'Fine, Mrs Kirk,' shouts Anne Petty, the student who has been living with them over the summer, having fallen out so severely with her parents she cannot go home, 'I'll see to it.'

  'I don't know how I'd manage without Anne,' says Barbara, sitting down in the canvas chair again.

  'Beamishes,' says Howard, 'can we stand the Beamishes?'

  'We've not seen them all summer,' says Barbara, 'We've not seen anyone all summer.' And that is true, for to the Kirks the summer represents the low point of the year, the phase of social neglect. Howard has finished his book--it flutters at them on the desktop--but creation is a lonely and introverted activity; he is in that flat state of literary post coitum that affects those who spend too much time with their own lonely structures and plots; he needs to be back into, to intervene in, the larger, grander, more splendid plots that are plotted by history. And Barbara has been domestic, and domesticity is an evasion to people like the Kirks; the self has bigger business to perform. But their party is a party for the world, too; they construct it solemnly. Howard is a theoretician of sociability; he debates about what he calls 'relevant forms of interaction', and the parameters of the encounter. Barbara performs the antithetical role, and thinks of persons and faces, not because men are abstract and women emotional--that is the sort of role-designation both of them would deny--but because someone has to keep abreast of who likes whom, and who can't be in the same room as whom, and who is bedding whom, and who ought sooner or later to bed whom, if you want to have really good parties. And the Kirks always do have good parties, have a talent for giving them. They are unstructured parties, frames for event, just as are Howard's seminars at the university, and his books, where urgent feeling breaks up traditional grammar, methodology and organization. But, as Howard always says, if you want to have something that's genuinely unstructured, you have to plan it carefully. And that, then, is just what the Kirks do, as they sit in their study, and drink their wine.

  The sunsquares on the wall fade; Howard switches on his desk lamp. The principle is creative, mixture. So the Kirks are mixing people from the town with people from the university, and people from London with people from the town. They are mixing heteros with homos, painters with advanced theologians, scientists with historians, students with Hell's Angels, pop-stars with IRA supporters, Maoists with Trotskyites, family-planning doctors with dropouts who sleep under the pier. The Kirks have a wide intellectual constituency, an expansive acquaintance; there are so many forms and contexts of changing life to keep up with. After a while Howard gets up; he leans against the bookcase; he stays 'Stop there. I'm afraid it's hardening. If we say any more, it'll turn into the kind of bloody bourgeois party we'd refuse to go to.'

  'Oh, you'd never refuse to go to a party,' says Barbara. 'I think we're losing spontaneity,' says Howard, 'we said an unpredictable encounter.'

  'I just want to ask,' says Barbara, 'how many people we'll have at this unpredictable encounter. I'm thinking about the work.'

  'We have to make it a real scene,' says Howard, 'a hundred, maybe more.'

  'Your idea of a good party,' says Barbara, 'is to invite the universe. And then leave me to wash up after.'

  'Oh, come on,' says Howard, 'we need this. _They_ need it.'

  'Your enthusiasm,' says Barbara, 'it never wears, does it?'

  'Right,' says Howard, 'that's why I exist. Now I'm going to pick up the telephone and make twenty-five calls, and you're going to make twenty-five calls, and there's our party.'

  'Martin's wet his pyjama trousers,' shouts Anne Petty from upstairs. 'Give him some more,' shouts Barbara, up the stairs. 'Roger, it's Howard,' says Howard, with the red telephone next to his ear. 'We're planning a bit of action. No, not that kind of action: a party.' There is a new book by R. D. Laing lying on the table next to Barbara's chair; she picks it up and thumbs through its pages. 'An accidental party,' says Howard, 'the kind where you might meet anyone and do anythi
ng.'

  'Or meet anything and do anyone,' says Barbara. 'Barbara's fine, I'm fine,' says Howard, 'we're just ready to get started again.'

  'Oh, yes, I'm fine,' says Barbara, 'fine fine fine.'

  'No,' says Howard, 'it's just Barbara having schizophrenia in the background. See you on the second. And bring anyone you can predict will be unpredictable.'

  'That's what we need,' says Howard, putting down the telephone, 'people.'

  'You've had all the people you can eat,' says Barbara. 'We need some fresh ones,' says Howard, picking up the telephone again, 'who do we know that we don't know? Ah, Henry, we need you, Henry. Can you and Myra come to a party?' And so Howard talks on the telephone, and makes twenty-five calls, while Barbara sits in the canvas chair; and then Barbara talks on the telephone, and makes twenty-five calls, while Howard sits in the canvas chair. The Kirks are a modern couple, and believe in dividing all tasks equally down the middle, half for you, half for me, like splitting an orange, so that both get involved, and neither gets exploited. When they have finished on the telephone, they sit in the canvas chairs again, and Barbara says, 'You buy the drinks, I'll buy the food,' and the party is all ready. So they go upstairs, to the kitchen, and here, side by side, wearing similar butcher's aprons, they prepare the dinner. The children run in and out, in their pyjamas; Anne Petty comes in, and offers to make dessert. Then they all sit at the table and eat the meal they have prepared; Anne Petty puts the children to bed, and the Kirks sit down in the living-room with their coffee, and watch television. It is unusual for them to be so together; they dwell on their amazement. Later on they go upstairs to bed together and, standing on opposite sides of the bed, undress together. They turn down the duvet; they switch on the spotlight over the bed; they touch each other, and make love together. The faces and bodies they have invented to populate their party come into the bedroom with them and join in the fun. Afterwards the light shines down on them, and Barbara says to Howard, 'I'm just afraid I'm losing some of my enjoyment.'