Eating People is Wrong Read online

  Introduction by John Boyne

  I first met Malcolm Bradbury in autumn 1994 in a place where I believe he felt most at home: a university campus. I had been accepted as a student on the Creative Writing MA that Malcolm and Angus Wilson set up in 1971, the year that I was born, at the University of East Anglia, Norwich. The reputation of the course had grown quite considerably due to the number of graduates who had gone on to successful careers in publishing and there was a sense in the media that Malcolm had a good eye for new talent. For a young man of twenty-three, to be part of the ’94/’95 intake felt like the beginnings of something thrilling, particularly since it had already been announced that Malcolm was due to retire at the end of our academic year. We would be his last students.

  There were twelve of us and we ranged in age, experience and ability. Some had completed unpublished novels and were ready to begin new ones; others, myself included, were still intimidated by the long form and were learning to write fiction through the short story. Each one of us however was passionate about writing and desperate to be good at it; Malcolm’s approval was the touchstone for our self-belief.

  I spent the summer before Norwich reading Malcolm’s novels in chronological order, beginning with Eating People is Wrong (1959) and finishing with Doctor Criminale (1992) on the plane over from Dublin. Looking back, it feels like a great shame that only one more novel would be added to his body of work, the time-shifting To the Hermitage, but of course his career was nothing if not busy and varied: he wrote novels, screenplays, literary criticism, television plays, and of course he taught.

  My first impression of Malcolm was that he fulfilled my every expectation of what Malcolm Bradbury (or a Malcolm Bradbury-type) would be. He wore tweed jackets, smoked a pipe (in class), glanced around the room every Wednesday afternoon as if he wasn’t entirely sure why any of us were there, smiled at us in an avuncular fashion and nodded while we poured scorn on each other’s work or showered it with extravagant praise. He was often rather quiet at the beginning of a discussion, not wanting to influence us one way or the other with his opinion, but letting us set the tone of the debate, forcing us to be better readers and critics, abilities which would ultimately make us more talented writers. But there was always a moment during class when it felt as if he had heard enough and then his voice would rise, cutting through whatever rot we were spouting, and he would carefully, considerately, but quite clinically explain why a particular story or extract from a novel in progress was not quite working, or why it was, or how it could be improved, or why it should be abandoned entirely. And we twelve would stop, listen, take it in and realize, of course, that he was absolutely right. Because the thing about Malcolm was, and I do not mean this unkindly, that he didn’t really care much about any of us – several hundred students had passed through his course over the years, after all, and he was long past making attachments; some had gone on to greatness, some to mediocrity, the majority had returned to their former non-writing lives – but he cared passionately about fiction, about the novel itself, about the idea that each of us should try to elevate the form and say something in it. He respected fiction in the way that a true novelist must; he understood how thrilling a well-turned sentence or brilliantly executed plot turn could be, how important stories were, how much they could say about the human condition. Above all else, I suppose, he simply wanted us to write the very best novels that we could.

  Almost twenty years later, upon being invited to write an introduction for one of Malcolm’s novels, I chose Eating People is Wrong because it was his debut and every student who has ever attended the creative writing course at UEA, before or since, has wanted to produce their own debut and for it to prove good enough to be published.

  Returning to a novel one has read many years before changes the memory of it considerably. Eating People is Wrong had certainly stayed in my mind for I hold affection for the now largely unexploited form of the campus novel but I was surprised by how funny the book still is. On almost every page, there’s a laugh-out-loud joke. (For some reason, I had recalled it as being a little more determinedly political and perhaps dour, but actually it’s quite hilarious.) ‘Did you have an unhappy childhood?’ a lady in a flowerpot hat asks Professor Treece, the forty-year-old Head of English, during an uncomfortable gathering. ‘I had an unhappy maturity,’ comes the immediate reply. Later in the same scene, Treece remarks that he’s not married. ‘I think that’s disgusting,’ she replies brightly. (It’s the ‘brightly’ that does it for me; the perfect word to make the line funnier than it already is.) Even the university itself is established in a building that used to be a lunatic asylum. (‘There were still bars over the windows; there was nowhere you could hang yourself.’)

  The campus novel grew in popularity during the 1950s, not least because of the success of Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954), but naturally enough most of the young writers attempting the form chose students as their protagonists. Malcolm, who was only in his mid-twenties when he wrote Eating People is Wrong, took a rather different approach, centring his story around a man who is entering middle age, when the frustrations of unfulfilment in every aspect of his life – career, relationships, the part of England in which he lives – are dominant.

  Occasionally, it feels very much like a novel of its time. Women are not perceived as highly intellectual creatures – the fact that the graduate student Emma Fielding is writing her thesis on fish symbolism in Shakespeare is played rather for laughs – and marriage, like in Jane Austen’s novels, is still seen as the preferred state. Dr Viola Masefield, one of Treece’s colleagues, is forced to stop wearing dresses with low necklines as they excite one of the students, ‘a matter of pain to her, because she still had a husband to catch’. Similarly, the representation of Mr Eborebelosa, a visiting student from Africa, the son of a chief who is in possession of four wives and an apparently endless supply of goats, borders on the uncomfortable at times for the modern reader. However, Malcolm Bradbury always balances any such concerns with a sharp and sceptical eye at the mores of the era. It’s clear that he’s poking fun at racial stereotypes rather than adding to their number. Emma regrets having lied to Eborebelosa about her relationship status, as he is ‘a member of a race which had been lied to too much already’. Asides like this, placed judiciously throughout the text, suggest a novelist who is dissatisfied with the society in which he is living and is writing about it in the hope that the fiction will subvert the status quo.

  One of the more intriguing characters in the book is Louis Bates, a pompous, self-regarding student, uncomfortable with social gatherings, a man whose idea of breaking the ice is to ask how many of the ladies present are virgins. One can’t help but wonder how many Bateses Malcolm encountered over his years teaching in Norwich; at times it must have seemed as if his creations were jumping off the page and applying for places, not in his fiction, but in his real life.

  Malcolm Bradbury’s death at the end of 2000 was a great loss to the literary world. He died too soon; there were more novels that should have been written, more young writers who might have benefited from his kindness and generosity. But, for all that, he left us this novel, and The History Man and Rates of Exchange, important books that remain vivid, provocative, funny and moving, novels that will continue to be read.

  The benefit (or not) of creative writing courses continues to be debated and, when it is, Malcolm Bradbury’s name is always invoked as the originator, the prime mover behind the notion that fiction is something that can, if not be taught, be nurtured, honed and offered a safe environment in which to flourish. And yet for all that, it seems from this debut novel that even that idea was one that was amusing to him. ‘The question really is,’ asks Professor Tree
ce, ‘are universities the best places for geniuses to prosper? I’m not sure they are . . . they overreach themselves, or they write one of those satirical novels about university life that people keep writing. I hope no one’s writing one of those about us, is he?’

  John Boyne is the author of ten novels, seven for adults and three for younger readers. He was a student on the Creative Writing MA at UEA during 1994/95.

  TO MY MOTHER AND FATHER

  Do I say man is not made for an active life? Far from it. But there is a great difference between other men’s occupations and ours. A glance at theirs will make it clear to you. All day long they do nothing but calculate, contrive, consult how to wring profit out of foodstuffs, farms, and the like. But I entreat you to understand what the administration and nature of the world is, and what place a being endowed with reason holds in it; to consider what you are as a person, and in what your good and evil consists.

  – Epictetus

  Contents

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  I

  TERM HAD just begun. Professor Treece, head of the department of English, sat at his desk, his back to the window, with the cold, clear October light shining icily over his shoulders on to the turbulent heaps of papers upon his desk, on to the pale young faces of his three new students. As the rain rattled against the panes behind him, and the students stared speculatively out at the last leaves falling damply from the trees, Professor Treece spoke sonorously. His comments were academic and solid. To speak in this mode had meant, over the last years, a certain settling down, a certain closing in of interests, a certain assumption of weighty mannerisms. It was not that he had ever been what was called, disparagingly, in the Senior Common Room ‘a bohemian’, or ‘a bit of a wild man’; if he had affectations, they were all permissible ones. The matter of it was really that for this appointment he was a very young man. Not too many years behind him were the wet and lonely days of post-graduate research, which persisted for him in the image of walking, with a briefcase full of books, among cold Bloomsbury houses, near the British Museum, breathing in the odour of the Underground Railway and of teashops that smelled always of weak tea. He had been born during the First World War and had, as he sometimes put it, just missed seeing the old England. Believing himself essentially hostile to the ambitious, expansive England of the years before his birth, he had in fact in full measure all the native nostalgia for it. He felt now essentially passé; generations, it seemed to him, don’t last very long nowadays. His generation was the one between the wars; the thirties were his stamping ground, and his predominant emotion was a puzzled frustration in the face of the fact that all the passions he had held then almost but not quite fitted the situation of the present time. The middle fifties kept dissolving, curiously, under his grasp. He was constantly in speculation as to what he might really catch hold of; life now was full of traps. Thus his political affiliation was socialist, but the socialist party never seemed to be on about the right things nowadays, and, further, it was curiously hard to determine what the right things were. The whole quality of injustice had changed now. Prime Ministers said, ‘You’ve never had it so good’; but intellectuals, surely, had never had it so bad. Where were things? People got angry but there didn’t seem to be anything to be angry about; perhaps that was why they were angry. It was as if his motive power, his sense of identification with the advancing movement of the world, had run short. Living in the provinces intensified the feeling. New terms and new students did not depress or excite him; he was hardly conscious of the renewing of the seasons. A routine was now established; he had been at the university long enough to know what to expect, not to demand too much.

  This tutorial, the first of the new academic year, had already assumed a characteristic tone of embarrassment and uncertainty. Learning lay heavily in the air like pipe-smoke. Treece leapt up jerkily from time to time to pull books suddenly from off their shelves, and it was like throwing stones into a pool; the students jumped visibly in their seats, as if they expected to be attacked. The cold light shone on the pupils of their eyes. Students (it was at Oxford and Cambridge that one called them undergraduates) were not at all cast in the heroic mould when it came to the study of literature; they plodded along the towpath like barge horses. And, for the teacher, the desire to mould the great spirit, along with the search to lead one’s own life on the heroic level, was soon defeated by the pressures of a heavy routine. Thus these three sat before him, the usual unpromising examination material which three years of tuition and, more importantly, self-discipline, concentration, good influences, would bring to degree level – gauche youths, shuffling their feet, opening and shutting their new briefcases, noting down with ostentation the not-always-valuable points, turning red when spoken to, propounding the too-glib possibility (‘Wouldn’t you say that was because of the influence of Marlowe?’), furtively inspecting their new watches to see how much longer this was going to continue. You couldn’t help wondering about their sex life; did they like it, would they get it, what would they do with it? It was with thoughts like these that Treece gave an extra-mural gloss to the academic man. That the place of knowledge was with experience he had no doubt, and the endeavour to attain to the former when one had so little access to the latter always seemed to Treece a hopeless and foolhardy proposition.

  Cumulo-nimbus stacked up outside; Treece always associated it with the provinces. Three weakly marigolds stood in a jar on his desk. Treece peered over the top of them and spoke on. He was saying nothing very interesting and no one was saying anything very interesting back. He had become disabused with his own sparks of passion. It was difficult to engage, in the issues he felt to be interesting, students who didn’t even buy books, who didn’t read the books they were invited to read, who had a scanty grasp of the contemporary or any other scene, who were unacquainted with the principles of logic and straight thinking. ‘Mind, a wasp,’ said one of them, pointing at a seedy-looking, tired wasp that was making forays at Treece from a refuge in the marigolds. It was as if their eyes sought out and fixed on objects as an antidote to Treece’s abstractions; their gaze flitted emptily about the air and focused on wasps, raindrops coursing down the pane, the decorated spines of books in the bookcase. And as, with the clearer formulation in his mind of the impressions gained from passing glances, the students each began to assume their own individuality, it became obvious to Treece that two of them at least were persons for whom statements about creativity meant exactly nothing. They were youths straight from some grammar school sixth form, rejects of Oxford, Cambridge, and the better provincial universities, whose course could be charted easily enough; one could name almost the haphazard collection of books that they would read, one could sketch out beforehand the essays they would write, indicate simply their primary values. They appeared each year, to eat for three more years in the university refectory, to join sports clubs, and attend the students’ union dances held each Saturday night, sliding gracelessly through weekly waltzes and tangos, drinking down beer at the impromptu bar, tempting girls out into the grounds in order to kiss them on damp benches; to throw tomatoes at policemen on three successive rag days, to go out in three years with perhaps as many girlfriends, and finally to leave with a lower second or third class degree, passing on into teaching or business seemingly untouched by what, Treece thought, the university stood for – whatever that was. Each year he wondered, is it worth it? Each year he planned to send out into the world, at last, a little group of discontented men who would share his own disgusts, his own firm assurance in the necessity for good taste, honest feeling, integrity of motive; and each year the proposition came to seem odious as he foresaw the profound weariness and depression of spirit that would overcome such people when, with too few vacancies in the faculties of universities, they would find themselves teaching in grammar schools
in Liverpool or working in the advertising department of soap factories in Newcastle. The trouble with me is, Treece thought, that I’m a liberal humanist who believes in original sin. I think of man as a noble creature who has only to extend himself to the full range of his powers to be civilized and good; yet his performance by and large has been intrinsically evil and could be more so as the extension continues.

  At this point Treece began, covertly, to inspect the third member of the tutorial group. He came as a slight shock of surprise. Unlike the others, he was not a youth and clearly had not come straight from school. He had an extremely large head, moulded in great pocks and cavities and formed on, it seemed, almost prehistoric, pterodactylian lines. The front of his pate was bald, but, starting in line with his ears, a great fan of unkempt black hair stood up; from out of large, eroded eyesockets, black shining eyes fixed Treece with a wet look that besought attention and interest. ‘Who?’ wondered Treece, pausing in his discourse. He had forgotten the man’s name and wondered whether he should, in fact, be here at all; he looked the sort of man who might have been passing the door and, seeing a tutorial about to start, had decided to participate. One could tell that he wanted to know. He was folded up tightly in a chair too small for him, but he held his head up high, fearless and brave, careless of the shoddy little receptacle that held him. The holes in his pullover disclosed a shirt with a pattern of heavy stripes. ‘Well, now,’ he kept saying judicially from time to time; occasionally he nodded his head with slow, approving motions. While he went on talking, Treece furtively consulted the pile of application forms left handy in a folder on his desk. Among the passport photographs pinned to their corners, he noticed one where the face of this disconcerting man peered fearlessly out, as if he was ready to have this one published in Time; the heavy light from above and the inferior photography emphasized the large bone structure of the cranium and the shape of his excessively large, wet mouth. The man’s name was Louis Bates, aged twenty-six. He had, the form revealed intriguingly, formerly been a teacher in a girls’ school. Then followed a gap of some time during which he had not apparently been employed, but elsewhere on the form a bit of a hint was given to the nature of this pause; his experience, he said, included six months’ library work in a mental hospital. Elsewhere, Bates had written, against the place marked Interests, in a large, European-style hand – ‘My interests are what the ultra-democrat would call “highbrow” or “longhair”.’ This was a curious mixture of the promising and the absurd. Treece, possessed, paused and looked again at Bates. The moment of interest was, it appeared, all that Bates had been waiting for for the last three-quarters of an hour. ‘Excuse,’ he said, wetting his lips with his tongue.