Doctor Criminale

by Malcolm Bradbury

  And so, over the next few days, when Ros wasn’t giving me the treatment, I set about Criminale. This may sound easy; it proved very difficult. There was no great problem about the works and the thought, and good old Scruton was a great help here. It was when I turned to the life that the hard graft began. In one sense, no one was more visible than Bazlo Criminale. His photograph – the mop of hair going from grey to white, the big bulky body, the sense of brooding presence – was in all the magazines. The man went everywhere. As I learned from People magazine, which had profiled him (twice), he lunched and dined with everyone who was anyone. He sat down nightly with Greek shipowners and Nobel prizewinners (many asked why he had not had one himself), with deep Buddhist thinkers and leading tennis stars, Umberto Eco and the Dalai Lama, Glenn Close and Pol Pot, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hans-Dietrich Genscher. The first-class stewardesses on every major airline knew him on sight, and had his favourite drink (an Amaretto) and his own embroidered slippers warmed and ready for him when he boarded a flight. Great international expresses stopped suddenly at unusual stations to let him off. When he landed at JFK, it seemed, he was ushered straight through immigration and into a stretch limo to be rushed to his favourite New York resting place (the Harvard Club). When he descended on Moscow, the Zils he rode in drove the special traffic lanes kept for top party officials. At UNESCO in Paris, it’s said, they had a suite at the top of the building for him just in case he chose to stop by and lay down his head.

  Certainly Criminale was power in the land; but which land? Well, no one land in particular, it seemed. He knew everybody, everybody knew him; he was Doctor Criminale. But ask where he came from, who paid him, how he lived so well, which institution he was attached to, and things grew more obscure. He was just that vague and placeless creature, the European intellectual. Take the question of his origins, for instance. Different reference books gave him different dates of birth: 1921, 1926, 1929, depending which you checked. According to one source (The Dictionary of Modern Thought), he came from Lithuania; look at another (Ramparts magazine) and he came from Moldavia. As for his present citizenship, he was Hungarian, German, Austrian, Bulgarian, even American. There were other basic disagreements. For instance, good old Modern Hermeneutics had him down as a hardline Marxist, but Critical Practice described him as a dissident and revisionist who had spent time in prison (but where?). His books appeared in a confusion of places: Budapest, Moscow, Stuttgart, New York. If you found one day he had been writing an article in Novy Mir on socialist realism, you’d also find that in the very same week he’d written an article for the New York Times on nouvelle cuisine. In short, Criminale grew ever more obscure the more you thought you were getting to know him.

  When I rang his London publisher, I learned no more. I asked their publicity girl (Fiona, of course) about their world-famous author, and source of many of their profits; she gave me nothing. She described Criminale as an unknown quantity, like Salinger or Pynchon, and quoted an office joke (‘What is the difference between God and Bazlo Criminale?’ ‘God is everywhere, Criminale is everywhere but here’) which did not strike me as funny. Fortunately it was Roger Scruton, helpful in this as other things, who set me on the right track. His book had only the slightest reference to Criminale’s actual life, but it had in its book-list a critical biography of our great man, written – but in German – by one Professor Otto Codicil of the University of Vienna. I pointed this out to Ros, who dialled some numbers and had the volume flown in by air express from Austria. Television, I found, works like that; it can really pull out the stops when needed, as I found many times more in the weeks and months to follow. Now, to be honest, I do not exactly know German. On the other hand I often think I understand, especially after drink or late at night. On a mod­erately full tank I can even read German philosophy. The small brown-paper-covered book that arrived by messenger from Vienna was plainly in a very exotic, philosophically enriched version of the language. Much of it was about Criminale’s ideas, with some of which the writer, Codicil, was clearly out of sympathy. But, using native wit, a German dictionary, and occasional assistance from Ros, who had done a course once but not remembered much, I was able to delve through it and piece together a rough and ready biography.

  According to Professor Codicil, who claimed to have received some assistance from his subject (even though his study was, he said, a critical interpretation), Criminale was born neither in Lithuania nor Moldavia. In fact he was in 1927 in Veliko Turnovo geboren. Some extra research with atlas and gazetteer established what and where Veliko Turnovo was – the ancient capital of Bulgaria, famous for its old university and monasteries, its storks and its frescos, its castle and its ancient Arabesque merchants’ houses. It lay not too far from the River Danube on the old trade routes that had run from East to West and, of course, vice versa, and was an important place of learning. The birthdate given, 1927, was also interesting, because that made Criminale of university age just around the rime the Second World War finished. At that time Bulgaria was, as the saying had it, ‘liberated to the Russians’ by Georgy Dimitrov, whose mausoleum was a place of pilgrimage in Sofia’s main square over the dark Cold War years. (Now, I gather, since the winds of change blew, his resting place has been gutted and is up for commercial development, probably by McDonald’s Hamburgers.) This probably meant that Bulgaria, land of attar of roses, fine frescos and also poisoned umbrellas, was not, at the time, the ideal place for a free and inquiring spirit. At any rate, it seemed that, around the time that Stalin i walked in, Criminale smartly stepped out – though it was not at all clear how far.

  Certainly, according to Codicil, over the next years Criminale studiert, a great deal, and none of it at home. He had in Berlin (Philosophie) studiert, though in which Berlin (there were then two, of course) he did not say. He had in Vienna Pädogogie studiert, though for how long this local recorder did not choose to make clear. He had also in Moscow (Politische Theorie) studiert, which could have explained his Marxism. However he had also in Harvard (Ästhetik) studiert, which could have explained his dissent from it. And if, to my naive eyes, Criminale’s life seemed baffling, so did what Lavinia called his loves. Criminale appeared to have married at least three times (in Prague, Budapest and Moscow), though he seemed to have divorced only once. This was a little bit obscure to me, even if it made total sense to him. As for career, there was a similar pattern of wandering, border-crossing, variety. Criminale had been, at various times (not put in order), a dozent at the Eötvös Lorand University in Budapest, Hungary; a dramaturge at the People’s Theatre in Wroclaw, Poland; the Kunstkritiker of a newspaper in Leipzig. Around this time he had also managed to fit in a bitter quarrel with Heidegger, an aggressive assault on Adorno, and a contentious revision of Marx. To all these matters Professor Codicil devoted many challenging pages, but they were hard to read, difficult to use, and not, I thought, likely to stir the tough soul of Lavinia, assuming she had one, very much at all.

  Things, I thought, might look a little clearer when I got to the years of Criminale’s rising fame. Unfortunately, you couldn’t say they did. Criminale was now elected to various academies; he ran a great many congresses, in various fields ranging from world peace to experimental film; he joined the committee of various international writers’ associations linked with ‘progressive’ views. He became a regular trav­eller, came to know Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir, met Castro and Madame Mao. Various international prizes came his way – for philosophy, economics, fiction. From time to time, in several different countries, he was offered political posts and even, once, ministerial office; he always refused. Apparently he preferred to concentrate on his articles and books, some of which were refused publication here, but managed to appear there. Codicil’s book, which predated by four years the coming down of the Berlin Wall, still talked about some of his books being held in reserve for ‘better times’. Attacked for his progressive attitudes in the West, he had also fallen foul of various bitter disputes in the Marxist citadel;
yet all the while his reputation grew. His lectures drew large crowds, and foreign universities began to summon him. He spoke at Bologna, lectured at Yale, attracted large audiences in Brazil, received an honorary degree in Tokyo. He commented freely on political regimes. He also advised Walter Ulbricht on human rights and Nicolae Ceauseşcu on architecture – two items in his dossier that must have embarrassed him considerably.

  So came the years of international fame, when he, and his books, appeared everywhere. His sales were said to rival Lenin’s in Russia, Confucius’s in China, Jacqueline Susann’s in the United States. When by the end of the Seventies ideological hostilities began to soften, and the certainties of the left began to fade, Criminale grew not less but more influential. Now he was going everywhere, meeting everyone. When the world, or just some particular philosophical congress, needed someone who stood in advance of Marxism, or bridged Materialism, Subjectivity and Deconstruction, they went, it seems, for Bazlo Criminale. He travelled as if frontiers were abolished; his books crossed the East-West divide as if it had never been there. He became a master of the conference lapel badge, a virtuoso of the plenary address. He consulted for the great international institutions: Comecon and UNESCO, the Stalin Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize, the World Bank and the European Community. He became friend to presidents. He took vacations with Gorbachev, went to the opera with Mitterrand, played golf with Reagan, drank beer with Helmut Kohl, scoffed tea and scones with Margaret Thatcher. When he lectured at Stanford in California, three thousand people turned out to hear him conduct an obscure discussion of Mandelbrot’s Fractals. Honorary degrees and other state honours came his way; he also became fame itself at its most serious level. One week he was photographed with Shevardnadze at the Bolshoi, the next with Madonna at the Brown Derby, the next in an argonaut’s cap on the steam yacht of some Italian socialite, arm carelessly tossed round some topless nymph or other,. Aegean in the background.

  So he had become the philosopher of the Nineties, the charismatic metaphysician of the age of the laptop and Chaos Theory, the philosopher who survived after the end of the old thinking. Finally, one evening, I put down Codicil’s difficult book, and reflected on what I’d more or less read. The more I thought about Bazlo Criminale, I realized, the more obscure and mysterious he now seemed. Upstairs Ros sat in the bath watching old videotapes. I climbed the stairs and went and spoke to her. ‘How can anyone please everyone all the time?’ I asked. ‘Get in, sonny, I’ll show you,’ said Ros. ‘I’m talking about Criminale,’ I said, ‘The man who is always praised for his devastating sense of order, his powers of logic. But I can’t say his life makes all that much sense to me.’ ‘Just forget Criminale for half an hour,’ said Ros, ‘Climb in, there’s plenty of room.’ ‘How can I forget Criminale?’ I asked, sitting down on the lavatory seat, ‘I’ve been living with this man for what seems like years.’ ‘A few days,’ said Ros. ‘And the more I think about him, the more I find out about him, the more he turns into a mystery.’ ‘What’s so mysterious?’ asked Ros, ‘He’s just a famous world intellectual and a hot-shot thinker of the Age of Glasnost.’

  ‘Fine, but what about the times before glasnost?’ I said, This is a man who comes out of the old Marxist world, where they didn’t mess about, believe me. There was right thinking and there was wrong thinking. If you started on the wrong kind they took your head off to make sure they stopped it.’ ‘It must have been more complicated than that,’ said Ros, They always had hardliners and dissidents.’ ‘All right, which of them was Criminale?’ I asked, This is a man who’s friends with Brezhnev and mates with Honecker. At the same time he’s hanging around with Kissinger and giving big lectures in the West.’ ‘I expect he was useful to both sides,’ said Ros. ‘Okay, how?’ I asked, ‘Was he an international emissary, a spy, what?’ ‘You’re overloading it, Francis,’ said Ros, ‘He was a famous philosopher who was above all those things. Like Jean-Paul Sartre. He went everywhere.’ This is a man who likes high living,’ I said, ‘He stays at some of the best hotels in the West. The Badrutt’s Palace in Saint Moritz, for instance. Where they charge you a monkey for just letting you turn the revolving doors.’

  ‘Well, wouldn’t you, if you could?’ asked Ros. ‘Of course,’ I said, The point is I couldn’t. This is a man from a poor world who lives like a prince. It’s almost as if some great international foundation had been set up especially for him.’ ‘Lecture fees, royalties from his books,’ said Ros. ‘All right, let’s take his books,’ I said, ‘Half of them were banned in Russia, but they still managed to appear all over the place.’ ‘He had to publish them abroad,’ said Ros. ‘But if they didn’t like them, why didn’t they freeze his bank accounts, take away his citizenship, put him in jail?’ ‘Maybe he was too famous abroad,’ said Ros. ‘You can always stop someone becoming famous abroad,’ I said, ‘Forbid him to travel, for one thing. They never did that.’ ‘Maybe he had friends in high places,’ said Ros, ‘Maybe they liked him to have a high reputation abroad but were careful of what he said back home. The Cold War was filled with these funny games. Or maybe they did forbid him to travel, put him in prison, and you just haven’t found out about it.’

  ‘All right, but it doesn’t say so in Codicil,’ I said. ‘Why should Codicil know all that much about it?’ asked Ros, ‘He’s just some Austrian prof. Anyway, you may not have read it right. You know your German’s hopeless.’ ‘It was, it’s been getting better by the minute,’ I said, ‘I still think the whole thing is pretty damn strange.’ ‘It’s just the same as Brecht and Mann and Lukacs,’ said Ros, ‘All those great figures who tried to be on both sides of the fence. They were survivors, Francis. They learned how to play the political game and still stay serious. Maybe that’s what a modern master really is. Someone who learns to swim with the flow, turn with the tide. But still bends history to his own advantage, so he can still do something. I want to do something. Let’s go to bed.’ ‘I’m sorry, Ros,’ I said, ‘I still haven’t done the treatment. And Lavinia needs it tomorrow. I’m going to have to work all night.’ ‘I want you in bed,’ said Ros. ‘I’m sorry, Ros, really,’ I said, ‘But for a man’s whole life, what’s one night?’ ‘You bastard,’ said Ros.

  And so, right through the night, full to the brim and more with Bazlo-Criminale, I tried to put his life into some sort of shape, his story into some sort of order. From time to time Ros thumped angrily on the floor of the room above, but I bravely resisted all sexual temptation. Everything Lavinia had asked for I tried to provide: the life, the loves, the friends, the enemies, the peaks, the troughs, the history, the settings, the fleshy human being from whom the thought emerged. I plotted and planned it, topped and tailed it, edited and word-processed it, bound and ribboned it. And whatever I explored, wherever I looked, Criminale seemed more obscure and enigmatic than ‘ever. So, the job done at last, I labelled it on the cover ‘The Mystery of Doctor Criminale’, and handed it to Ros when she descended to breakfast in the morning, in very testy mood.

  ‘You didn’t come to bed at all,’ she said. ‘No, but I finished it,’ I said. ‘This is it?’ she said, glancing it over, ‘It’s a very full treatment.’ ‘It’s a very full life,’ I said. ‘More than thirty pages,’ said Ros, not reading but simply turning over the sheets, ‘Lavinia said no more than ten.’ ‘You try getting a remarkable man like Criminale down to ten,’ I said, ‘Aren’t you going to read it?’ ‘Haven’t time,’ said Ros, ‘I just hope you made it all perfectly understandable. Arts commissioning editors don’t know about ideas, only noise and pictures. All they do is listen to pop groups and go to art openings all the time.’ ‘I’ve cut down on most of the ideas,’ I said, ‘It’s nearly all about his mysterious life.’ ‘Does he have a mysterious life?’ asked Ros. ‘Yes, I told you last night,’ I said, ‘A life of contradictions, blanks, and deceptions.’ ‘Okay, Francis, I don’t have time to argue,’ said Ros, ‘Just call me a taxi and I’ll take it to the bitch. Oh, and since you haven’t anything to do today, could you chop t
he courgettes for when I get back?’

  The courgettes were as dry as macadamia nuts, the armadillo was gasping, by the time Ros got back three days later, two bottles of Frascati in her hands and an erotic grin on her face. ‘Brilliant,’ she said. ‘What? We did it?’ I asked. ‘You did it, I did it, mostly Lavinia did it,’ said Ros, ‘She went to the Commissioning Editor at Eldorado and came back with a two-hour arts feature special.’ ‘Two hours?’ I said, ‘I thought it was only one.’ ‘Yes, but they fell in love with it, Francis,’ said Ros. ‘What, with my treatment?’ I asked. ‘I don’t know about the treatment,’ said Ros, ‘I’m not sure they exactly read the treatment. It’s far too long. No, the title. The Mystery of Doctor Criminale, that really pulled them in.’ ‘Oh, that’s terrific,’ I said.

  ‘Anyway,’ said Ros, ‘They’ve given us twice the develop­ment money, they’ve hooked in PBS in the USA, and they think the Europeans are interested. I told them Criminale was a European, he is, isn’t he?’ ‘Oh, definitely,’ I said, ‘As European as they come. So it’s good after all?’ ‘Brilliant,’ said Ros, ‘And when I say brilliant, I really mean brilliant. We’ll get a major slot, major budget, major production values. So come on, let’s celebrate. Up the stairs, Francis.’ ‘Surely we can drink Frascati down here,’ I said. ‘I have better things to do with Frascati than just drink it,’ said Ros, ‘Oh, and Lavinia thinks you’re brilliant too.’ No sooner were we standing there naked in the shower, pouring Frascati all over each other for some reason, when the portaphone rang. ‘It’s her, I know it,’ said Ros, popping out of the shower to get it, ‘That bloody bitch Lavinia. Darling!’ Ros talked a moment and then put down the phone. ‘Bitch, she wants to celebrate too. She’s coming round right away.’ ‘Oh, not Lavinia too,’ I said. ‘No, let’s be quick, honey,’ said Ros, ‘You can have too much of Lavinia at times.’