The history man WELCOME BACK TO THE HISTORY MAN FIRST COMMISSIONED BY THE SUNDAY TIMES, PUBLISHED IN LIAR'S

S LANDSCAPE Malcolm Bradbury Just over 30 years ago, I invented, for fictional purposes, a character who quite wonderfully turned into a long-lasting literary figure. His name was Howard Kirk, he was a radical university lecturer, and he appeared in a satirical novel called The History Man (1975). Howard, the 'history man,' then took on a splendid new lease of life when, after Mrs Thatcher had come to power, he was played by a magnetic and Zapata-moustached Anthony Sher in the BBC-TV dramatization of the story. I say I invented Howard Kirk, and yet no character ever came my way more naturally. He was an entirely familiar figure on every modern campus if, like me, you happened to teach in one of those bright concrete-and-glass new universities that sprang up over the Sixties in Britain, and right across Europe and the USA. Most people then on campus knew a Howard Kirk. He was the easy-going left-wing lecturer from the Swinging Sixties who had seen it happen, seen it fail, and had to live through what came next: the Sagging Seventies. Always radical, always seductive, always seducing, he was eternally on the side of the students against the fascistic institution that paid his salary, and always against those who were over thirty, even if he was himself 35. Howard believed in history, progressive history, and where it was inevitably leading us. As he said, if you wanted to understand, you needed to know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little history. Yet the subject he taught wasn't history at all, but something vastly more 'trendy' (as everyone said then). Howard taught Sociology. And sociology was the most fashionable, radical and popular of all subjects in the academic canon of the day. In new universities like mine it acquired special place, as one of those inter-locking, interdisciplinary subjects that allowed us to widen and re-integrate the great map of learning. It united philosophy, political science, anthropology, economics, history, cultural and popular studies, literature and art in a spirit of quasi-scientific objectivity. It was high theory, the most conceptual of subjects and yet it was data-based, empirical, very hands on. It was a master subject, offering an over-arching account of all social phenomena, entire historical epochs or ideologies yet it was fascinated by the topical and the ephemeral. It was a 'value-free' approach to the world yet it was also political. It stood beyond ideology, yet was a super-ideology. Sociology had a glorious heyday in the Sixties and then began to fragment and die -- not as a discipline among others, but as the great discipline, the key to all knowledge. In this process it seems I played a part. In an interesting article in the January issue of Prospect, "Return of Sociology," Ian Christie, deputy director of the think-tank Demos, says the turning point was clear.

It was the appearance of The History Man in 1975 that led to the backlash against sociology, when "Bradbury's demolition of his anti-hero's hypocrisies and pretensions was hailed as though he headed up an army relieving a city beseiged by Marxist academics." In fact I had no armies, and even I don't believe novels make that kind of difference. But out went the baby with the bathwater, says Christie, and sociology has not really recovered its authority since.

I would naturally be sorry to feel I alone had done such irremediable damage to a subject I respect and consider a major component of learning. Sociology, I would be among the first to say, is a distinguished, historical, and very European form of study, whose origins go back to the Enlightenment like much else that is good. It was shaped by great thinkers Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Durkheim, Weber and, for good or ill, has much to do with human progress and social understanding. Over the last two centuries, sociology sought to provide a comprehensive account of society, show models of how institutions work, compare ours and other societies. It studied class, race, gender and ideology. It considered how and under what determining influences people thought (sociology of knowledge) and how they believed (the sociology of religion). It explored suicide, alienation, anomie, sport and advertising. Yet something distinctive did happen to sociology between the 1950s and 1970s. The subject reached its heyday, particularly in Britain and the USA, and then quickly ran off into its decline. What must have become obvious to all parties was this was a sociological phenomenon in itself. Why, then, did sociology achieve such a central role in Britain and the USA in the postwar years, and why did its pretensions collapse later? One explanation of the rise of sociology to its queen-bee role in the postwar map of learning was given by the left-wing American sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of influential books on the Power Elite and the Military-Industrial complex. In his 1959 book The Sociological Imagination, Mills claimed the sociological viewpoint was itself the product of the radical alienation that was one of the consequences of modernity. "Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps," the book begins. The modern individual came to see the world as "an outsider, a permanent stranger." Individuals cease in the modern mass to feel like individuals; they feel themselves as part of a process, a mob. They struggle to understand the history in which they're trapped, but it is beyond comprehension: "The history that now affects every man is world history." Mills proposes the 'sociological imagination' as a form of what we would call, in another hideous word culled from the wreckage, 'empowerment.' He was offering, in a sense, a form of Marxism without a manifesto, a social critique in the form of a science, a view of history where history already is powered with a well-guided sense of where it's supposed to go. Mills was right: his age had turned to the sociological viewpoint. It was the time of the embracing cultural analysis, the handy social textbook. Postwar society was different from prewar, and required new reporting. In Britain, at this time, Richard Hoggart was publishing The

Uses of Literacy, Raymond Williams' The Long Revolution, the New Left analyzing such forces of social change as youth culture, sport, pop music. In the Fifties USA popular sociology flourished, as if the New World was being discovered anew. In the early 1950s David Riesman had published his remarkable study The Lonely Crowd, identifying a quite changed American identity in the age of urban mass society. Other key studies such as Vance Packard's The Hidden Persuaders portrayed Americans as docile, in the hands of commercial manipulators, deceived by their own leaders, driven to conformity and social consent. The 'sociological' reading of postwar society came after the massive crisis of world war and the growth of a new era of ideological conflict, the Cold War. The mid-century crisis left earlier political thought discredited: Fascism disgraced, Marxist theory in a state of Stalinist stupefaction. Ideology itself was challenged, yet the intellectual apparatus of ideology the study of society, class and politics was in demand. All over Europe, old societies were being reconstructed with new political orders. Old balances of power and borders of empire had collapsed. Newly emergent post-colonial societies were multiplying, some fledgling democracies, some various forms of peoples' republic. Above all, a new social order based on commodified mass capitalism was evolving in conflict with an opposite order, and the world was being rapidly transformed by economic and ideological forces that were constantly in conflict. The Sixties Revolution was itself a confused radical paradox: Marxist utopian dreams were somehow to be financed by endless bourgeois wealth. It was never consistent, and both succeeded and failed. The great sociological syntheses of the 1950s and 1960s lost their inclusiveness and certainty. Society ceased to be the great wonderland and became, simply, the mess we're in. Popular radical sociology was an episode. It gave us much, not least the enquiring, relativistic spirit in which we now perceive our 'membership' in society. Despite the many claims it made, it did little to deepen or enrich the sense of society or social existence. The atomized, random, value-free, self-creating, hedonistic self of the Nineties is just as much the product of all that radical sociology as it is of some Thatcherite distrust of the very idea of society. Like most Enlightenment projects, the great enterprise became lost in its own ironies. The idea that our cultural understanding needed to spread democratically from elite to popular culture has turned, in the hands of the media makers and programme controllers, into the great Nineties dumbing down. The ideological scepticism of the 1960s about the institution of the bourgeois family has given us the aimless modern household and the erosion of the ethical and selfresponsible individual. In short, the radical, Marxizing, counter-cultural sociology of the 60s has largely provided much of the ideological and moral framework of postmodern consumer capitalism. Ian Christie suggests the time is ripe for a return to sociology, and proposes that the 'defeat' of the 1970s is being reversed. I hope he's right. It is one of the paradoxes of our time that a society

that is heavy with social self-description and self-documentation is so bad at defining the larger level of its moral, familial and community dilemmas. In a number of recent books he mentions Conversations with Anthony Giddens Christie sees a return to serious debate about the nature and the workings of society. Yet he also notes we do not yet have the enquivalent among contemporary sociologists to a Richard Dawkins or a Stephen Jay Gould, the large thinking figures who construct a significant relationship with theory and practice for an entire discipline. As Christie sees, if sociology is to make its return, it will have to swim outside the think-tanks, and recover some of that grand intellectual energy that delighted us thirty years ago when the likes of David Riesman, Talcott Parsons, Richard Titmuss and Jurgen Habermass could make us understand the power and wonder of the idea of society, the mysteriousness of history. Howard Kirk was a rogue of rogues, but at least he believed that. No doubt in 1979 he would have voted for Thatcher, and in 1997 for Blair. He would be enjoying his vice-chancellorship at Batley Canalside University, and the life peerage has been a source of the greatest pleasure. But at least Howard believed even if it was chiefly for his own advantage in all the things that still do matter. He believed in history, society, philosophy, ideas, human progress, mental discovery, all that's left of the Enlightenment Project. As for his recent books, The Prospects for the ECU, Or How Europe Got Rich has done well this Christmas, and so has his Brief History of Football. The history men are not often sociologists these days. As for me, the ones I read are the Linda Colleys, the Norman Davies, or the new theorists in genetics or earth science. The fact remains that, if Ian Christie can find the published evidence that can persuade me, I shall be as delighted to hail the revival of sociology as I was sad to attend its fall. L ord of misrule It outraged moralists and feminists, but Malcolm Bradbury's The History Man was one of the most influential novels of the 1970s. David Lodge hails a modern classic David Lodge The Guardian, Saturday 12 January 2008 The title of Malcolm Bradbury's third novel, published in 1975, has become a proverbial phrase, invoked in journalistic headlines and echoed by other writers (eg Alan Bennett's The History Boys) without any thematic reference to its source. To understand why The History Man impressed itself so deeply on the British collective consciousness and the English language, the novel itself must be placed in its historical context - or contexts (for there were two). Bradbury is often labelled a "campus novelist", but in his work, as in all the best examples of the genre, the small world of the university is a stage for the dramatisation and examination of larger issues. The History Man is set almost entirely in and around the University of Watermouth, a fictitious town on the south coast of England, but it dealt with an international phenomenon, the movement for revolutionary change in social, political and cultural life which erupted in western Europe and the United States in the late 1960s, and set the progressive agenda until it ran out of

steam at the end of the 70s. It was a complex phenomenon, made up of many different elements from Marxism and Maoism to rock music and recreational drugs, but it was essentially a rebellion of youth against a patriarchal old order, largely inspired by middle-aged gurus, and launched from the expanding universities of the post-war world. I dealt with the phenomenon in a fairly light-hearted way in my own novel Changing Places: a tale of two campuses, published in the same year as The History Man. Bradbury's take on it was darker and more troubled. The University of East Anglia, to which he moved from Birmingham (where we were colleagues) in 1966, was one of several new residential universities built in England in the 1960s on landscaped sites at the edge of cathedral cities and county towns. At the time they were seen as exciting and trendy places, committed to educational innovation, and therefore especially open to the influence of the new counterculture. But all institutions of higher education were affected. Students, herded together and suddenly removed from parental control, were ripe for ideological awakening and sexual experiment, which sometimes turned into indoctrination and exploitation by their teachers. Bradbury observed this scene with a satirical relish for its absurdities and contradictions, and a sombre concern about its social and cultural effects - in particular its programmatic rejection of the values which he held dear: respect for the individual, moral responsibility for one's actions, social progress through consensus rather than conflict and what one of the remnants of liberal humanism in the novel, Henry Beamish, calls rather mystically, "the attachment of knowable people and the gentleness of relationship". The action of the novel is placed very precisely in 1972, just when the first flush of enthusiasm for the late-60s revolution began to fade, and those who had hitched their wagon to that Zeitgeist were concerned to keep its momentum going. One such is the central character, a sociology lecturer in his early 30s called Howard Kirk. Sociology was the key humanities discipline of the time, especially in the new universities, and well adapted to mediate the new progressive ideas. Literature departments were just as hospitable to the counterculture, and as internally divided about it, but the chief opponent of Kirk's views in the novel, and spokeswoman for "liberalism, humanism, and moral responsibility", is a lecturer in English literature: Annie Callendar. It is she who identifies Kirk, in academic shorthand, as "a history man". In The Poverty of Historicism (1961) the philosopher Karl Popper defined historicism as "an approach to the social sciences which assumes that historical prediction is their principal aim, and which assumes that this aim is attainable by discovering the 'rhythms', the 'patterns', the 'laws' or the 'trends' that underlie the evolution of history". Marxism is the most obvious modern exemplar of this kind of thinking, and it is the chief though not the only source of inspiration for Howard Kirk's radicalism. The words "history" and "inevitable" are constantly on his lips. He believes the plot of history has just entered a critical phase from which a new world of human freedom and possibility will be born, and that it is his duty to help it along by some smaller-scale plots of his own. Conveniently, this mission coincides with his inexhaustible appetite for intrigue, control, and sexual conquest. The History Man disconcerted many readers who had enjoyed the more genial comedy of Bradbury's previous novels. Even those who admired it did not find it a comfortable or

comforting book, while those who resisted and rejected its implications found they could not put it down. The discomfort was caused by the fact that there is no character with whom the reader can happily identify, and no authorial assistance in the task of interpretation and judgment. The book's power to grip even the resistant reader is the product of a tightly constructed narrative and a distinctive, strangely hypnotic verbal style. This is how it begins: 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 . . . 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. This is the authorial voice - knowing, sardonic, and educated, but also detached, impersonal, opaque. The narration here, and throughout most of the novel, is in the present tense, not like a story-teller recounting something that has already happened, but more like the verbal equivalent of a movie camera, tracking the characters through space and time into an unknown future. If you open the book at random you see dense blocks of print in which descriptive sentences and dialogue are packed together without interpretive commentary or the presentation of the characters' private thoughts and feelings in free indirect style. When he wakes on the morning after the party, "In Howard's head is a dry image of a person: Felicity Phee, a mottling of spots above her breasts." But that is as far as we are allowed to see into Howard's mind: we don't discover what he thinks about having had sex with his student the night before. The passage proceeds: He activates muscular mechanisms; he gets out of bed and walks, through the party detritus and the unredeemed daylight, to the bathroom. He urinates into the bowl; he takes his razor from the medicine cabinet, and unravels the cord. He plugs the razor into two black holes under the white globe of the light. There are hundreds of sentences like these. They are largely purged of metaphor (which means that any hint of it, as in "unredeemed" and "black holes", has a powerful effect) and completely lacking in what rhetoricians call "elegant variation," the avoidance of verbal and syntactical repetition. The style of the book is full of deliberate repetition, sometimes taken to extreme lengths - "The floors are being cleaned by a cleaner with a cleaner." The unsettling absence of depth or interiority in the narrative mimics the negation, implicit in Howard's deterministic ideology, of the individual human consciousness on which liberal humanism is founded. This doesn't mean that the novel is empty of thoughts, feelings, anxieties and desires. The characters talk about such things obsessively. Why does Howard's friend and colleague Henry Beamish have so many accidents? Why does his wife Myra want to leave him? Why is Barbara Kirk unhappy? What does Felicity Phee want from Howard? Why is he such a compulsive philanderer? These questions are addressed continually in dialogue between the

characters, but their answers conflict, or are self-contradictory, and none is privileged. The reader must pick and choose among them in forming his or her own interpretation of the story. The action takes place mainly in the first week of the autumn term. We see Kirk presiding over his party like a Lord of Misrule, beginning his exploitative affair with Felicity Phee while continuing to sleep with his colleague Flora Beniform and endeavouring to bed Miss Callendar, plotting a totally factitious protest movement on campus and discriminating outrageously against a student of conservative views. When it seems that this last action will bring about his own downfall, Kirk goes in search of the student's ally, Annie Callendar. He seeks out the man who had brought her to his party, "a depressed-looking figure who, ten years earlier, had produced two tolerably well-known and acceptably reviewed novels, filled, as novels then were, with moral scruple and concern". The novelist (no prizes for guessing his identity) refuses to tell Howard where she lives, but he tracks her down in her old-fashioned flat and seduces her in her old-fashioned bed. She is hesitant, reluctant, but ultimately willing. No single element in The History Man provoked more discussion and disagreement among its readers than Annie Callendar's capitulation to Howard Kirk. Feminists and traditional moralists were equally disappointed or outraged by it. Couples quarrelled about it. What gave offence to many was that a character who is presented as satisfying his own ego under guise of supporting a collective revolution does not get his comeuppance, as the development of the plot seems to promise, but is allowed to escape punishment and even to triumph at the end of the story. By this, I take it, Bradbury meant to imply that liberal humanism, with its built-in tolerance and selfdoubt, is always vulnerable to those who are convinced they have a monopoly of the truth; but perhaps too there is an acknowledgement that the representatives of liberal humanism in the novel are a pretty spineless lot, and a grudging admiration for Kirk's energy and determination to make things happen. The novel was not an instant success when first published. It divided reviewers, some of whom did not get the point of its style. It was not shortlisted for the Booker prize and it was not a bestseller. It was written against the grain of the times, and the bien pensants, however much they secretly relished its satirical wit, were reluctant to approve it publicly. But gradually it was recognised as one of the key books of the 1970s. And then, at the beginning of the next decade, it had a second lease of life and reached a much wider audience, thanks to television. In 1981 the BBC aired a four-part mini-series very faithfully and skilfully adapted by Christopher Hampton. It proved to be a landmark in British TV drama, and made a little-known young actor called Antony Sher a star in the leading role, but it was received in a political climate very different from when the novel was written and published. Mrs Thatcher's Conservatives had won the General Election of 1979, and embarked on a political programme which sought to reverse everything the Kirks and their friends stood for. The radical Right was now in the ascendant, and its pundits welcomed The History Man as a confirmation that left-wing academics were corrupting the minds of the young. The universities were subjected to savage cuts in public funding in the 1980s, and sociology in particular fell into disfavour.

A writer in Prospect magazine in January 1999 traced the decline of sociology as an academic subject back to The History Man. In short, Malcolm Bradbury's critique of left-wing radicalism from a liberal humanist position was appropriated and vulgarised by right-wing radicalism. Bradbury himself deplored and disowned this application of his story, and the producers of the television serial, as if nervously anticipating such a reaction, appended a footnote to the credits at the end of the last episode: "Howard Kirk voted Conservative in the General Election of 1979", though this seems highly improbable. The meanings of fictions cannot be so easily revised or controlled. It is hard to disentangle the reception of the novel from the reception of the television version, but one good effect of the latter was to prompt many more people to read the former, and to establish it firmly as a modern classic. The counterculture radicalism which the novel anatomised is now itself history, as is (in Britain at least) the right-wing radicalism which superseded it. But today there are new forms of radicalism, fundamentalisms of various kinds, and The History Man is still relevant, warning of what can happen when, in the words of WB Yeats, "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity."