Eating People Is Wrong by Malcolm Bradbury

First published: 1959

Type of work: Academic comedy of manners

Time of work: The 1950’s

Locale: An English provincial university

Principal Characters:

• Stuart Treece, the protagonist, a professor of English
• Louis Bates, a twenty-six-year-old undergraduate who affects bohemian ways and demands special consideration from Treece and others
• Emma Fielding, a graduate student with whom Treece and Bates become romantically involved
• Mr. Eborebelosa, a West African student who suffers from British racism and his own superiority complex
• Carey Willoughby, a belligerent novelist
• Viola Masefield, a fellow professor

The Novel

Eating People Is Wrong follows an academic year in the life of Stuart Treece, professor of English and head of the department at a provincial English university. Proceeding in a chronologically straightforward manner, the novel deals largely and successively with the individual social and personal situations in which Treece ineffectually tries to make his presence felt and his moral imperatives understood. What emerges is a comic yet sad portrait of Treece’s invariable failures: a postgraduate sherry party, an undergraduate tea, a botched driver’s test, and a fumbling attempt at sex with his colleague, Dr. Viola Masefield, among others. The novel deals not only with Treece’s at times nearly slapstick pratfalls and social as well as amorous and moral blunders but also with his thoughts about himself as he ponders his fate and that of his small world-his thoughts proving no more effectual than his actions. To a lesser extent, the novel deals with those characters, most notably Emma Fielding, Louis Bates, and Mr. Eborebelosa, whose circumstances parallel Treece’s in a number of ways. Were this an existential novel, these characters would experience the feeling of being de trop, but since Eating People Is Wrong is a variation on the British subgenre of the academic comedy of manners, of which Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim (1954) is perhaps the best-known example, Bradbury’s characters suffer the more homely plaint of feeling unwanted, displaced, marginal.

Treece, for example, finds himself at age thirty-nine at a professional backwater, a provincial university that looks like a railroad station and that originally served as an asylum for the insane. Treece is not only academically decentered, however, apart from the intellectual activity of Oxford and Cambridge and London’s cultural life, but apart in another and larger sense as well: He discovers that his 1930’s style socialism is no longer viable, his moral scruples are no longer appropriate, and his high-minded liberal humanism is at best a mere curiosity, for the university no longer serves as a haven in a heartless world but is instead its training ground. Blundering from one scene to the next, Treece provides all too ample evidence of the inadequacy of good intentions in an England that has become characterized by the phrase “you never had it so good.” Unable to save Mr. Eborebelosa from either his own cultural myopia or the racist gang that attacks him, unable to decide whether Bates is a fool or a genius, unable to appeal to Emma as a lover but only as a child in need of her care, and unable to challenge successfully a modern age typified by the slovenly, rancorous young novelist Carey Willoughby, on the one hand, and the university’s business-minded vice chancellor, on the other, Treece makes his inevitable way from failure to failure and finally to the hospital ward where, suffering from a hemorrhage of moral strength as well as blood, he is last seen.

The Characters

Focusing on an already narrow academic world, the novel achieves a certain claustrophobic effect entirely appropriate to the limitations that Treece both feels and embodies. Moving from scene to scene, the reader experiences a sense of repetition and stasis rather than of motion and progress; again the effect is entirely appropriate, for Bradbury’s interest lies less with plot and action than with structure and, especially, character-not in the sense of the fully rounded characters about which E. M. Forster has written but in a very nearly allegorical sense. Treece, for example, is not simply a liberal humanist; he in fact embodies the liberal humanist dilemma: He can think, but he cannot act; he can speak of morality, but he cannot bring his moral imperatives to bear upon the world except in the most trivial ways. Obsessed by moral scrupulousness, he only ends up suffering from a paralyzing ambivalence, a willingness to weigh, ad absurdum, both sides of every question. Feeling alone and betrayed by a world he can understand but not accept, he retreats into the passivity he confuses with freedom. He knows that he must venture into that world but nevertheless lacks the moral energy and moral courage to do so; similarly, he wants to love Emma but only ends up putting himself in the position of a child in need of care. What is worse, he drifts further and further into a purely abstract world; as Emma clearly understands, Treece does not want to marry her but only to marry. Even though he is to be admired for his honesty and moral scrupulousness and his clear-sighted judgment of the limitations of his age, Treece is unfortunately just what he calls himself: a parasite. This “poor little liberal humanist” knows that eating people is wrong but cannot quite refrain from eating a few himself, devouring them in a haze of abstraction and righteousness. As he advances from age thirty-nine to forty, this “man of promise,” as he ironically calls himself, discovers that his promise has already run out and that he has become, as Viola Masefield says, “a dustbin of experiences.” His failure is, however, less individual than emblematic of the general failure of the very liberal humanism that allowed postwar pragmatism to triumph.

Bradbury plays a variation on the Treece theme in his handling of Emma Fielding. Like Treece, Emma is both critical and self-critical. Although a far more reliable person than Treece, she too suffers from a similar want of moral energy and prefers passivity to engagement, retreating in the relative safety of the past, the Georgian house in which she rents a room while figuratively cannibalizing its eccentric owners. Her retreat cannot provide her with any real satisfaction, however, for again like Treece, Emma is too self-aware to rest easily with her own limitations and shortcomings or with Treece’s for that matter. Even her “saint complex,” as Viola calls it, has its limits.

Emma draws the line as well with Louis Bates, who is, like Emma, twenty-six, and therefore older than most of the other students; like Treece, he comes from a working middle-class family and is in love with Emma, or in what passes for love with Bates. Virtually a caricature of that postwar British phenomenon, the proletarian college student and would-be angry young novelist, Bates is a decidedly comic figure: as pompous and egotistical as he is unkempt and uncouth, a poseur who suffers from delusions of grandeur, a buffoon who may nevertheless be a poetic genius. Although it is impossible to take the ever-intruding Bates seriously, he does present a serious challenge to Treece and Emma and indeed to the academic community, which would like to get rid of him. Bates’s presence calls Treece’s attention to his own intellectual limitations and to the possible superficiality of his moral code. Emma is similarly troubled in that she wants to help Bates (as she does Eborebelosa) but cannot do so without having Bates (again like Eborebelosa) confuse liberal concern for amorousness. Trying to draw the line, Emma only ends up rowing along the Avon with Bates, who, true to his Treece-like form, nearly drowns when swans attack the boat and Bates, who cannot swim, falls out. Comedy transmogrifies into something darker if not quite tragic when, shortly after, Bates attempts suicide, leaving Treece and Emma to contemplate the parts they have played in his life and near death, to gauge their responsibility, and to deal with a guilt that appears sincere but is nevertheless little more than the residue of a once-healthy morality.

Critical Context

Written largely while Bradbury was an undergraduate, Eating People Is Wrong bears surprisingly few marks that would distinguish it as a first novel by a very young writer. Even the charge of derivativeness, or indebtedness to Lucky Jim, no longer seems especially convincing, for Eating People Is Wrong is hardly a Movement novel. Rather, it is a work in which all sides are satirized and in which the satire is used not simply to deride but to call into question and in this way to make possible not the nostalgic return of the golden age of liberal humanism but the ground upon which its essential moral core can be made viable in a post-liberal humanist age.

Bibliography

Haffenden, John. Novelists in Interview, 1985.

Halio, Jay L. British Novelists Since 1960, 1983.

Ziegler, Heide, and Christopher Bigsby. The Radical Imagination and the Liberal Tradition, 1982.