Doctor Criminale

by Malcolm Bradbury

  I looked at her. ‘Work for you how?’ I asked. ‘My company, Nada Productions, I run it with my big friend Lavinia, is doing this huge arts feature for Eldorado Television,’ said Ros, ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost.’ ‘Fantastic,’ I said. ‘We need someone to research and present it,’ she said. ‘Oh no,’ I said. ‘You’re just the person, educated, literary, nice-looking.’ ‘I’m not, not after last night.’ ‘Especially after last night,’ said Ros. I stared at her again, thinking hard. ‘Which bit of last night?’ ‘Both bits of last night,’ said Ros, ‘The bit on the box and the bit in the sack.’ ‘You said I was worse than Howard Jacobson,’ I said. ‘Oh, you were,’ said Ros. ‘Which bit of last night?’ ‘Both bits of last night,’ said Ros, ‘But Howard’s doing something else. Don’t worry, Francis. You got these really great reviews.’

  She pushed over the morning papers at me; I picked up the Independent first, being one of those people who always does. ‘Biter bit,’ said the headline, and the piece began: ‘The only thing that will save last night’s Booker television coverage from a justified total oblivion was the sight of one of Britain’s most bumptious journalists, the ineffable Francis Jay . . .’ ‘You call this a good review? It’s terrible,’ I said. ‘It’s a mention,’ said Ros, ‘I told you, you were memorable. It means you’re a television personality.’ I knew a person of sense, a man of reason, would have called a halt at this point, and I did try. ‘No, no more television,’ I said, ‘I’ve learned all about myself. I’m really a verbal person, not a visual person.’ ‘Oh come on, I read your column,’ said Ros, ‘It’s pretentious crap, any kid could write it. No, the moment I got you in front of that camera I knew you could do it for a living.’

  ‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘What, live?’ asked Ros, ‘I’m not surprised, after what you swilled down last night at the Groucho. Never mind, it will look better after breakfast.’ ‘I don’t want breakfast,’ I said. ‘There’s something you’d rather do instead of breakfast?’ asked Ros. I looked at her; she looked frankly at me. ‘You ought to be at work,’ I said. ‘I told you, I’m an independent,’ said Ros, ‘That means I do it my way. So why don’t we do it my way?’ So we did, in fact, do it her way, which was quite an athletic and unusual way. And that, as it happens (and that is more or less how it happened), is how I came to spend the next months of my chaotic young life wandering the world in pursuit of Doctor Bazlo Criminale.

  2

  How did I become so involved with Doctor Criminale?

  Now to this day, this very day, I have no very clear idea of why – in those difficult weeks after the Booker, when my whole journalistic career collapsed, and I housesat (and a good deal more) for Ros – my fate and fortunes, life and future, became so inextricably involved with those of Doctor Bazlo Criminale. I had heard of Criminale, naturally; who has not? In the last few years his name has shown up everywhere. One week they’re profiling him in Vanity Fair, the week after in Viz and Marie-Claire. But I knew him the way most of us know of those big public figures who raise our interest, maybe our hackles – through the interface of print, that perfect technology for letting us keep company with those whose lives or actions make us curious but whose faces we have no wish to see, whose destinies we have no desire to share.

  In short, Criminale was the text, and I was the decoder. He was an author, and I was a reader. Now I belong, as I’ve already said, to the age of the Death of the Author. According to the rules of my excellent education, writers don’t write; they are written, by language, by the world outside, but above all by us, the sharp-eyed readers. The word Criminale, the sign Criminale, the signature on the spine Criminale – that was more than enough for me. I had him there, a text, and had no wish to go further with him, no intention of doing so. So, I repeat, just how did I become so involved – so ridiculously and inextricably involved – with Doctor Bazlo Criminale?

  There was certainly nothing in the ordinary logic of things likely to bring us together. He was a great international figure, the man known as the philosopher for our times, the Lukacs of the Nineties; I was an out-of-work hack from the provinces. He was one of the superpowers of contemporary thought; I was a pygmy from Patagonia. He was the keynote speaker, I was the footnote or appendix. Seemingly no great congress of world writers, no international meeting of intellectuals devoted to whatever it might be (world peace, human rights, the survival of the ecosphere, the future of photography), no high-level diplomatic reception to celebrate some new treaty of cultural friendship and co-operation, was complete without the presence of Criminale; I of course was never invited. Here was a man who measured out his life in summit conferences, ministerial receptions, congress programmes, Concorde take-off times; my main travelling adventures were attempts to get to work on the decrepit Northern line. While he travelled the world in the best interests of modern thought, staying at grand hotels the Villa d’Este in northern Italy, Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in Saint Moritz – of such splendour that even the chambermaids had been finished in Switzerland and the desk clerks had degrees from the Sorbonne, my idea of luxury was a bottle of aftershave for Christmas. No, there seemed little or nothing that could possibly link together the lives of Bazlo Criminale and myself.

  Even so, over the next few days, as I began to research the man for the one-hour programme in the arts documentary series ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost’ that Nada Productions – the small independent company that Ros ran with, as she put it, ‘my big friend Lavinia’ – was offering to Eldorado Television, I naturally came to know him better. These were not easy days, I assure you. No cheque came from my collapsed newspaper. There was no word of compassion, never mind compensation, from the Official Receiver who had so kindly taken over its troubled affairs. Luckily I had Ros’s offer of bed and board – though the board was, it became very apparent, completely dependent on the bed. Each night Ros would claim her rental in the great gymnasium of her bedroom, where her experiments in revisionist gender-pairing and new theories of orgasm proved remarkably demanding. Ros was one of those people who believe that the outer parameters of sex have still not been entirely discovered yet. Each morning she would rise refreshed, to water the houseplants, feed the armadillo, and set off, bright as a new BMW, for Soho and the small one-room offices of Nada Productions.

  And each day, a little more weary from what had so refreshed her, I sat down in the country kitchen of the town house in the Bangladeshi district behind Liverpool Street station to set to work on my new career: reading and noting, sifting and filing, computing and scrolling, trying to find my way around and into the complicated and mythical figure of Bazlo Criminale. Each evening, fresh and bracing as an arctic storm, Ros would return, bearing yet more books and journals, photos and clippings, files and faxes, by or about or otherwise pertaining to our subject. Next we would consume the oven-ready vegetarian low-cholesterol pastas I had slipped out to buy during the afternoon, and then retire to the upstairs laboratory for yet more advanced physical research.

  Then each next day I would get up, feeling a little less whole than before, and return to my other duty, the probing and pushing and plotting and planning that took me just a little closer to the mysterious world of Bazlo Criminale. Small wonder that before long I began to feel like one of those nameless non-heroes that live in Samuel Beckett’s novels – a hermit of thought, a tired scribe whose every written word is each day collected and taken away by some higher power, a worn and lifespent soul whose every recollection and every bodily juice has somehow been squeezed out and extracted for use elsewhere. And so it went on, day after day for a week or two or three. There was myself, there was Ros, and there was the paper figure of Doctor Criminale.

  Now if you read at all – and of course you must do, or you wouldn’t be here with me in the first place – you too have probably heard of Criminale. For if you read, he writes; oh, how he writes, or has written. In fact ‘writing’ seems far too small a word to describe the output of forty years that has spurted from
his pen, too petty by far to define the prodigious mental energy, the overwhelming intellectual ambition, that had kept him in endless creation, far too simple a term to denote the output of works that stand stacked in the bookstores from Beijing to Berkeley, to the point where he must surely soon be due his own Dewey Decimal classification. Nothing reduced his output. No matter how far he travelled, how often he lectured, how many congresses he attended, he wrote, and was never silenced. Stories tell us that since he was seventeen he usually produced a poem a day, and probably a journalistic article too. And since then, just as he had seemed to visit every country, so he appeared to have visited every literary form: the novel and the philosophical treatise, the play and the travel essay, the epic poem and the economic tract. And if this were not enough, his photographic studies of the late modern nude are acknowledged everywhere (see the recent exhibition in Dresden, with Susan Sontag writing the exhibition catalogue). We are talking here about an all-round man.

  So the theatre-goers among you will doubtless know his great historical drama The Women Behind Martin Luther, which is generally compared with Brecht, and not generally to Brecht’s advantage. And what serious reader hasn’t read, and probably wept a tear or two over, Homeless: A Tale of the Modem Age, that small but perfect novella that Graham Greene once named as the finest single work of the second half of the twentieth century? Biography-buffs will know his great three-volume life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (Goethe: The German Shakespeare? ), which not only restores to us the indivisible wholeness of the man but proves beyond doubt that the German Reich could never have existed for a minute without him. Others will remember his extraordinary work of economic theory, Is Money Necessary?, which had so much impact in Soviet Russia, and his summative study The Psycho-Pathology of the Postmodern Masses, favourite reading of social psychologists and police chiefs everywhere. Add to that those vast illustrated tomes on Graeco-Roman civilization so weighty they must have cracked in two the Manhattan coffee tables they were doubtless intended for, and the small paperback works on Marxist philosophy whose tattered covers once filled the bookstore windows in Leningrad and Moscow and were awarded as swimming prizes at Communist summer schools worldwide, and you already have a polymath. Criminale didn’t simply write in every literary form; he seemed to appeal to every political culture.

  All this I expect you know very well. But, believe me, this is only the beginning of the man called Bazlo Criminale. Oh, you may have sat in the stalls and enjoyed the epic spectacle of The Women Behind Luther, or wept on your couch or your poolside recliner over the sweet perfection of Homeless. But have you read – and when I say read, I mean really read – his remarkable critique of phenomenology? His startling and courageous refu­tation of Marx’s techno-centrism? His audacious challenge to Nietzsche on modernity? His classic dispute with Adorno about the interpretation of history? The bitter quarrel with Heidegger over irony (which Criminale had much more of, and won)? You haven’t? Well, I have. For Criminale was not simply a writer. Unlike most writers, he thought as well.

  In fact he had simply to catch sight of a German philoso­pher and he was in there after the jugular, only to glimpse a key modern idea and he was gnawing it like a bone. ‘The Philosopher King’ was the title of one of the articles (from an American magazine) I read in the pile that Ros brought home; it described him as the only true philosopher left in a post-philosophical culture, the man who has singlehandedly reinvigorated philosophy by writing its epitaph. Clearly no late modern idea was really an idea, no contemporary ideology pulling its weight as an ideology, until Criminale had tried it, put it through the fine grinder of his mind, tested it to destruction, given it – or withheld – his imprimatur. You could say, indeed, that by the beginning of the Eighties Criminale had already become to modern thought pretty much what Napoleon was to brandy. Nobody would have taken the stuff so seriously had not someone so obviously important and prestigious taken such an interest.

  In short, as I came to discover, in those taut and tiring days after the Booker, Criminale was a true Modern Master. In fact if you want to find out more about him, as I did, you only need turn to the small volume on him (by Roger Scruton) in the ‘Modern Masters’ series, edited by Frank Kermode, published by Fontana Books. Here he appears in the list between Chomsky and Derrida – a fate, to be fair, not of his own choosing, but simply deriving from the random lottery of the alphabet. In what the blurb aptly defines as ‘a truly exhilarating examination of Criminale’s work’, Scruton warmly compares him with Marx and Nietzsche, Lukacs and Rosa Luxemburg, Gorky and Adam Smith (of course Scruton compares everyone with Adam Smith), and sees him as the modern Goethe. Not every single one of these comparisons goes in Criminale’s favour, but there is one that does. The others were all dead. While Criminale was alive, and well, and living in . . . well, where on earth was Criminale living? Probably not on earth at all, but in some jumbo jet overflying the Pacific. For Criminale wasn’t just famous, he was also that new phenomenon: the intellectual as frequent flyer, more airmiles to his credit than Dan Quayle. And the truth is, as I soon found out, researching and re-researching our one-hour feature for the series ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost’, trying to keep up with a truly all-round man is truly all-round work. Of Criminale there seemed to be simply no end.

  *

  One day Ros’s big friend Lavinia showed up. Big she was indeed – big across the shoulders, monumental everywhere else, dressed like a sofa, but ten times more aggressive. I realized that some stormy dispute had blown up between Ros and her partner, and that what’s more I was its subject. Lavinia, it seemed, had serious doubts about whether someone like myself, untrained and unwashed in the field of television production, should have been entrusted with a key project on which the future of Nada Productions depended. The word ‘toyboy’ was used, I well remember, several times, both in my presence (‘So this is the toyboy, is it, darling?’) and then on the other side of a half-open door I happened to sit down quite close to.

  ‘But he’s brilliant, really,’ I heard Ros declare several times. ‘In bed maybe, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘But really, Ros. All he does is sit on his pretty little butt all day and read things. That’s not how you research a major programme. Perhaps you’re tiring the poor sod out.’ ‘No, Lav, he jogs every lunchtime, he can take it,’ I heard Ros say, not with perfect truthfulness. ‘Okay, you’re giving him the treatment,’ Lavinia said, ‘Fine, but what I’d like to know is, when is he going to give us the treatment?’ ‘He’s made lots of notes,’ said Ros. ‘Darling, if it was notes I was after I’d have commissioned Andrew Lloyd Webber,’ said Lavinia, ‘I have to have a real treatment. Something I can go to Eldorado with and raise oodles of money, right? Sex is sex but cash is better. Where the hell is he?’

  Then suddenly the door flew open, hefted by Lavinia’s vast shoulders, and she was all over me. ‘Okay, you, Francis,’ she said, ‘Just explain to me what’s happening. You’ve been working on this eight days and as far as I know you’ve come up with nothing.’ ‘I thought there was plenty,’ I said, ‘The refutation of Adorno, the quarrel with Heidegger —’ ‘Heidegger Schmeidegger,’ said Lavinia, looking at me with pity, ‘Darling, 1 you’re not writing your doctoral dissertation or an article for TLS. You’re researching a TV programme. We don’t want to know what the old bugger thinks. If there’s thinking in the programme he can sit there and do it himself. I want a plot, a life, a person. Tell me how he looks, who his friends are, who he screws, where he drinks, why he matters. Find me where he is.’ That’s not easy,’ I said, ‘He lives up in the air on jumbo jets most of the time. Just now he seems to be holed up somewhere, writing another book.’ ‘God, not another book,’ said Lavinia, ‘Come over here, darling. Sit on the sofa by me. Now listen, I’d like you to forget the philosophical conundrums. I don’t want to hear any more about the symbolism of feet in Homeless. I want a living, breathing, fallible human being, just like you and me, Francis, only more so. Capeesh?’

 
; I looked at her. ‘But Bazlo Criminale is a Modern Master, Lavinia,’ I said. ‘Right, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘And I expect if you turn over a Modern Master, you’ll probably find a Modern Mistress. Honey, I want life and loves. I want friends and enemies. I want flesh and bones. I want peaks and troughs, failures and successes. I want locations, cities, houses, churches, parks. I want some people we can get our teeth into. I don’t want quarrels with Schmeidegger on being and non-being. I know he wrote a lot, darling. That doesn’t mean you have to. Just give me ten pages: life, loves, family, sex, money, politics. You have two more days, and then I’ll personally come and gut you. Find something we can use on television. It’s a fleshy human medium, with great stories. Is that my taxi? Terrific, all right, bye-bye darlings.’ ‘That bitch,’ said Ros, as we watched Lavinia climbing heavily into the taxi in the little street outside, ‘She’s jealous, of course. Did you like her?’ ‘Well, not entirely,’ I admitted. ‘Oh, brilliant,’ said Ros, ‘She always pulls stunts like this to take my men away from me.’ ‘The problem is, what am I supposed to do next?’ I asked. ‘Come upstairs and I’ll show you,’ said Ros. ‘No, I mean about Criminale,’ I said. ‘Do what Lavinia says,’ said Ros, ‘Everyone does what Lavinia says. Write ten simple pages. Break him down into segments.’ ‘Give him the treatment?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ros, ‘Come on.’