The History Man

by Malcolm Bradbury

  'You're envious,' said Howard, 'I've made something without you.'

  'It's a smart punishment for the baby,' said Barbara, 'but it's about us, and it's empty, so I don't like it.'

  'It's about what we've experienced, but in its context,' said Howard, 'we wanted to change. We wanted to live with the movement, the times. We both wanted it. If that book's just trendy, then what are you?'

  'I'm just living, the best way I can,' said Barbara, 'but you want to make it all into a grand plot. A big universal story. Something of major interest.'

  'Well, that's exactly what commitment is, Barbara,' said Howard. 'I don't think so,' said Barbara, 'I just think I'm living, and you're simply theorizing. You're a kind of self-made fictional character who's got the whole story on his side, just because he happens to be writing it.' Howard had thought that he was living too, and when Barbara had gone he sat in front of the manuscript on his desk. Inspecting the end of it, he found that Barbara had written a comment she had copied from one of his own notes on the end of a student essay: 'This seems to me a reasonable theoretical statement on the subject, but it contains none of your real experience of life in it, as an aware person.' But he was an aware person, and he knew the book said so; the lesson was a lesson in jealousy.

  So Howard went on with the book, with a new urgency, and he finished it off quickly. Then he sent it off, without telling Barbara; and almost at once he got a contract and a very good advance for it from a well-known left-wing publisher, who proposed to do both a hardback and a cheap paperback edition, with extensive publicity. He showed the letter to Barbara; despite herself, she was impressed. She had mentioned the book critically to a few friends; now she spoke warmly about it in a wider circle. The victory pleased him deeply. He felt the delicate balance of their relationship changing again; he had produced his baby. He knew he had better take the advantage while it was there, so he sat down again in his office one day and wrote off letters in answer to the advertisements in the professional journals, applying for posts in sociology in other universities. The subject was in a state of expansion; there was much movement in the profession, largely because of the impact of the new universities, many of which had made sociology a main part of their new academic structure. There was some advance publicity for the book out by now, and he had done an interview which had appeared in the Observer; all this seemed to help his chances. He was invited for interview at three of the universities to which he wrote; one of them was Watermouth, and that was the one that interested him most, for here was a new programme, with a chance for him to develop his own approach. Now he told Barbara what he had done. At first she was indignant, recognizing that it was an element in an obscure campaign against her. But then she became curious, and when he came down to Watermouth, taking the long train journey down from Leeds, to attend the interview, Barbara came down with him.

  This was when the Kirks visited Watermouth for the first time. Howard was interviewed in the panelled Gaitskell Room of the Elizabethan hall which had been the original starting-place of the new university, before the towers and the pre-stressed concrete and the glass-framed buildings that were now beginning to spread across the site, the achievement of that notable Finnish architect Jop Kaakinen, had even been conceived. The interview was affable. The interdisciplinary programme of the university, and its novel teaching methods, excited Howard, after Leeds; he could see he was being taken seriously; the modernistic campus growing on the old estate pleased him, seemed in concord with his sense of transforming history. Meanwhile, down in the town, Barbara, who had left the baby in Leeds with friends, poked around in the radical bookshops, checked out the organic delicatessen, inspected the boutiques, and looked in on the family-planning clinic. She had never really been in the south of England before; it had an optimistic, exciting look to her; she thought she saw an amiable radicalism everywhere, a fighting modern style that seemed several light-years ahead of the grimmer, tighter world of Leeds. In this new place, she saw herself, saw both of them, claiming the remaining historical rights the old Kirks had denied themselves. She sat on a railed seat on the promenade and stared outwards at the sea, a novelty, a pleasure. There were two or three palm-trees flourishing in the promenade gardens, and a few oranges growing. She thought of the child playing down on the sandy beach; she thought of the swinging parties. There were hippies with backpacks leaning over the railings; there were people talking French; there were works by Marx and Trotsky on the railway station bookstall. She saw a chance for herself in this sunlight; when Howard came back from the interview, and she learned he had been offered the job, she was bright with excitement. 'You ought to take it,' she said, 'it's a good scene.'

  'I already have,' said Howard, 'you're too late.'

  'Oh, you shit,' she said, 'without consulting me'; but she was pleased, and they walked down on the beach, and skimmed stones together out at the sea. The stones bounced and it was not like Leeds. And that, more or less, give or take an element of self-interest here, a perceptual distortion or two there, a dark ambiguity in this place or that, is the exemplary and liberating story, as Howard explains, of how the little northern Kirks came to be down in Watermouth, with its high sunshine record and its palms and its piershow and its urban demolition, buying wine and cheese and bread, and giving parties; and, of course, growing some more-for the Kirks, whatever else they have done, have always gone right on growing.

  III

  So it was in just another such autumn, the autumn of 1967, when Vietnam was a big issue, and the tempers were fraying, but a year before the year, when self-revolutions like the Kirks' turned into a public matter, that the Kirks moved themselves, south and west, to Watermouth. They drove down from Leeds in the minivan, an item of possession they had just acquired; the new university of Watermouth had tempted him with two additional increments, and for the first time in their lives the Kirks found themselves with a little money to spare. In the van they sat side by side, watching motorway unroll, the landscape change. The baby chattered in its large basket in the back; on the rear window was a sticker saying 'I live in an effluent society'. In front the Kirks sat silent, as if each one of them was all ready to leap out, as soon as the van rolled to a stop at their destination, and tell his or her own story. It had been a busy summer; and there were stories to tell. For now it was coming to seem to Barbara that this was a false move, a victory for Howard, a defeat for her; passing through the Midlands, south of Birmingham, they crossed a line into error. One trouble was that, over the summer, despite the fact that she believed herself scientifically sealed inside against this sort of intrusion, she had found herself pregnant again; it was a matter of mystery and anger. She was also angry because she saw now that Howard was in the vastly stronger position over the move; he was coming to Watermouth with a reputation ahead of him. It was, admittedly, a slightly shaky reputation, for popularizing innovation; but it really was a reputation. For, also over the summer, his book had come out, and done well. The publishers had changed a franker title to The Coming of the New Sex, which they thought would sell widely; and it was already clear that the book would be a commercial success. It had also been greeted, by the culturally attuned critics of the Sundays and the intelligent weeklies, as a work in consort with the times. Howard had not done a great deal of research on the book, and it was weak on fact and documentation; but what it lacked there it made up in argumentative energy, and a frank sense of participation in the permissive scene. As Barbara would tell people who came up to talk about it, at the many parties they were invited to in Watermouth that autumn: 'Oh, sex is Howard's field. I think you can say he's done a really big probe there.' But it had generally been found a committed, advanced book, on the right side; and it did sound quite sociological as you read it. So Howard, of course, arrived with an air of esteem already promised him, as well as a useful status as a sexual performer. Barbara, on the other hand, was coming pregnant, and part disabled, and with no reputation ahead of her, one way or the other, and brood
ing on this over the summer she had begun to resent the fact.

  It was lucky that, on arrival, they were able to stay for a while with some old Leeds friends of theirs, the Beamishes, who had made the move down to Watermouth one year earlier, and had helped interest Howard in the place. Henry Beamish was a social psychologist, who had himself made quite a stir the year before by proving in a book that television socialized children much more effectively than their parents ever could. From this controversy he appeared to have done extremely well. Certainly the Beamishes, when the Kirks found them again, had changed. They had left the atmosphere of Leeds' radical bedsitterland, of beer parties and trips to watch City on Saturdays and demos outside the Town Hall, well behind them, and had found a new style for their new setting. These people who in Leeds had no money, and used to borrow kettles from their friends because they could not afford to buy one of their own, were now settled, outside Watermouth, in an architect-converted farmhouse, where they were deep into a world of Tolstoyan pastoral, scything grass and raising organic onions. Henry Beamish had grown a new beard of the naval type, heavily touched with grey. He looked very well, despite the pallor left by an unfortunate episode shortly before when he had been poisoned by a mushroom, gleaned at dawn off his own estate; he had even acquired a certain baffled, slightly elderly dignity. Myra now looked stouter, wore her hair in a tight Victorian bun, and smoked small brown cigars. It seemed to Howard that there were two accurate phrases for what they had become over the move, though he forbore to use them, for they were his friends, and they both involved the profoundest condemnation: but weren't they both middle-aged now, and middle-class? The Kirks stared, on their arrival, at the house, at their old friends; they spent much of the visit on their hands and knees with wet toilet paper, sponging out babysick from the good carpet in the smart guest bedroom. It was not an encouraging arrival; but, on the first night, as they sat in front of the opened-out brick fireplace, Henry, pouring homemade wine into Italian glasses, said 'It's strange you should come today. I was just telling some friends of ours about you last night. About that time your marriage nearly broke up. And you came and stayed with us in the flat, Barbara, do you remember? You were carrying the television set and a saucepan.'

  'Christ, yes, that's right,' said Barbara warmly, and immediately felt better, because she realized that she did come with a reputation ahead of her, after all.

  The real truth about coming to Watermouth, Howard tells people now, with great frankness, is that their arrival unnerved them both. They had known how to live in Leeds, since it was a society that simply amended the one they had grown up in. But Watermouth, from the start, made them wonder what to become, how to build a nature. Leeds was working class, was built on work; Watermouth was bourgeois, built on tourism, property, retirement pensions, French chefs. As they inspected the Beamishes, it seemed to deny existence, to be a freak bazaar of styles; you could be anything here. Radical philosophy approved this, but here it was bourgeois indulgence. Admittedly, as Howard said, we are all performers, self-made actors on the social stage; all role is self-or other-assigned; yet, for a man who believed that reality didn't exist yet, he had to admit he found Leeds more real. The Kirks, staring at Watermouth in the indulgent sunshine, discovered they did not know how to place themselves, house themselves. They drove around in the hilly inland behind the town, in Henry's little 4L Renault, looking at what Henry termed 'properties'. There were a lot of properties. Myra and Barbara sat in the back, the baby between them, a tight squeeze; friend to friend, they explored and analysed in high detail the latter-day ebb and flow of Kirk marital history. In the front seat, Howard sat next to Henry, peering through the windscreen, the visor down, an estate agents' map on his knee, noting with Northern radical scepticism the exotic social mixes through which they passed. From time to time, feeling the need to counter-balance the prejudiced narrative recorded in the back, he talked, victoriously, to Henry, in the sunlight, of his well-liked book, of the reviews, of the new commission and large advance the publisher had given him. Now and then Henry stopped the car, and they got out, and solemnly examined a property. Henry's taste in property had been transformed, become rural and bourgeois; he praised, mysteriously, 'advantages' like paddocks and stables. The Kirks stood and stared, peering through trees at hills. Never having encountered a property before, they had no idea how to behave in the presence of one; they knew their radical desires were being subtly threatened and impaired, even though Henry told them what was true, that they had more money now, that a mortgage was a good investment for the advance, that the time in their lives, with a second baby, was here when they should settle down. But down was not where they wanted to settle; a hideous deceit seemed to be being practised; Henry, having already destroyed himself, was seeking to inculpate them too. 'A property is theft,' Howard kept on saying, looking around at the endless wastes of unpopulated, orderly countryside that surrounded them, depressed them with its frightening timelessness, its unlocated look, its frank detachment from the places where history was happening, the world was going onward and on.

  After two days of this, when Henry was about to take them into yet another estate agency in yet another commuterized small town, somewhere in the hinterland of Watermouth, its windows filled with announcements about retirement bungalows, Howard felt the need to speak true. 'Look, Henry,' he said, 'you're trying to impose some false image on us, aren't you? We're not like this, Barbara and me, remember?'

  'It's a very sound residential area,' said Henry, 'you'd keep your resale value.'

  'We'd go off our heads in one of these places,' said Howard, 'we couldn't live with these people, we couldn't live with ourselves.'

  'I thought you wanted something nice,' said Henry. 'No, for Christ's sake, nothing nice,' said Howard, 'I don't come from anywhere like this. I don't accept its existence politically. You don't either, Henry. I don't know what you're doing here.' Henry stared at Howard with a slightly shamefaced, slightly baffled look. 'There comes a time,' he said, 'there comes a time when you realize, Howard. You might want change, well, we all want change. But there is an inheritance of worthwhile life in this country, Howard. We all come to need a place where you can get down deeper into yourself and into, well, the real rhythms of living. That's what Myra and I are into now, Howard.'

  'Here?' asked Howard. 'There's nothing here. You stop fighting.'

  'Well, fighting,' said Henry, staring at little photographs of houses in the window, 'I'll do my bit for betterment. But I'm divided. I'm not wild about all this violent radical zeal that's about now, all these explosive bursts of demand. They taste of a fashion. Punch a policeman this year. And I can't see what's wrong with a bit of separateness and withdrawal from the fray.'

  'No?' asked Howard. 'That's because you're bourgeois now, Henry. You have the spirit of a bourgeois.'

  'No, I don't,' said Henry, 'that's nasty. I'm trying to give my life a little dignity without robbing anyone else of theirs. I'm trying to define an intelligent, liveable, unharming culture, Howard.'

  'Oh, Christ,' said Howard, 'evasive quietism.'

  'You know, Henry, I'm sorry,' said Barbara, 'but if I lived like you, I'd die first.'

  'Bourgeois, bourgeois,' said Howard the next day as, their things packed, the baby in the back of the van, they drove off from the farmhouse after an uncomfortable parting. 'Well,' said Barbara, trying to be kind to the kind, the people who had saved her when she was wandering loose with a television set, 'don't forget, they haven't had all our disadvantages.'

  They drove, over bridges, through chines, towards the town and the sea; they were escaping, back into Watermouth to get the feel of urban life again, to consort once more with staple reality. There were houses and dustbins and rubbish and crime. In the end, Howard resolved to visit the Social Security department in Watermouth; he needed to set his spirit right, to reassure himself that the place in which he was planting his destiny really did have a sociology-had social tensions, twilight areas, race issues, cl
ass-struggle, battles between council and community, alienated sectors, the stuff, in short, of true living. Leaving the van in the car park, with Barbara and the baby inside, he penetrated into the bleak 'offices, and was granted a stroke of luck. For here was working one of his own former students from Leeds, a girl called Ella, who wore granny spectacles, and denim jeans and top, and knew his radical temper, and, like any good student, shared it. An adult girl, Howard said to Barbara later, after she had left her desk in the office and got into the minivan with them, crouching in the back, next to the baby's basket, promising to show them the real Watermouth. She hunted out the areas of deprivation hidden between and behind the old private hotels, the new holiday flatlets; she probed the unexpected social mixes tucked behind the funfair and the holiday facade of the town; she showed them the acres of urban blight, the concrete of urban renewal. 'Of course it's a problem town,' said Ella. 'Oh, they'd like to pretend it isn't, that might discourage the tourists. But anywhere that brings in people for the holiday trade in the summer and then dumps them on unemployment pay in the winter is going to have problems, and they've got them.'

  'Any radicals?' asked Barbara. 'Plenty,' said Ella. 'It's full of hippies and dropouts. All these places are. It's a town you can run to and disappear. There are empty houses. Visitors are soft touches. Lots of marginal work. No, it's a good place.' She gave some directions and brought them into the slum clearance area. 'Of course nobody wants to see this, but here's what they ought to rub their tourists' faces in,' she said, pushing her way into an empty old house where meths drinkers, drunks, addicts and runaways came, she said, to spend the night. You could see they did; the Kirks penetrated through the back door into the chaotic brokenness of the house; its stair-rails were snapped, and there was excrement in the corners, litter on the floor, bottles smashed in the bedroom, gaping holes where the glass had been knocked out from windows. Barbara stood in the bleak spaces, holding the baby on her shoulder; Howard wandered around. He said: 'We could get some permanent squatters into this.'