The History Man by Malcolm Bradbury

First published: 1975

Type of work: Social satire

Time of work: The fall semester of 1972

Locale: The fictional Watermouth University in Watermouth, England

Principal Characters:

• Howard Kirk, a professor of sociology at Watermouth University
• Barbara Kirk, his wife
• Henry Beamish, a friend of the Kirks and Howard’s colleague
• Myra Beamish, his wife
• Flora Beniform, another sociology colleague
• Moira Millikin, another sociology colleague
• Miss Annie Callendar, a member of the English Department
• Felicity Phee, a student and sex partner of Howard
• George Carmody, a traditional student

The Novel

In mock-epic and mock-sociological style, The History Man satirically explores the rituals of a contemporary social phenomenon, at its height in the early 1970’s: the unstructured life, whose deliberate lack of form becomes the new structure of things. Defined by its Freudian-Marxist context, human nature is, in Malcolm Bradbury’s words, “a particular type of relationship to the temporal and historical process, culturally conditioned....” Howard Kirk, joined by his wife, Barbara, is the full embodiment of the postmodernist man, with his new self-consciousness. At the basis of this mode lies the abandonment of traditional sexual, familial, and professional (academic, in this case) mores.

The epicenter of events, Howard, a professor of sociology at Watermouth University, makes things happen to himself and to those around him—or, in his own terms, allows them to happen. These “happenings,” a term used by Bradbury in the narrow sociological definition of the protest generation of the 1960’s, form the loose plot of the novel. Happenings occur at two parties held by the Kirks’, one at the beginning and the other at the end of the fall term. All the remaining action radiates from these central events. To their parties the Kirks invite friends, colleagues, students, and strangers, in the hope of generating spontaneous happenings that will destructure existing feelings, attitudes, and relationships. Howard practices his beliefs to the hilt. In lesser degrees and with varying results, most persons in his orbit find the new rituals exhilarating. Others, however, are less than satisfied, and some are even devastated in the end. The desolation experienced by the two persons at one time closest to Howard finds expression in the smashing of a window, at the first party by Henry Beamish and at the second party by Barbara. The first “accident” goes unnoticed by most of the guests; the second occurs even more quietly at the novel’s end. On this last note Bradbury ends his sociological romp through the sexual and intellectual promiscuities of the new man in the new academia, which has little in common with the Oxford-Cambridge, or Redbrick, university traditions of England.

The new rituals include Howard’s sexual exploits with Flora Beniform, an Earth Mother figure whose sexual appetite matches Howard’s in its lustiness; Felicity Phee, a student starved for sexual gratification from her academic idol; and Miss Annie Callendar, the prim English Department faculty member who loses all inhibitions by the end-of-term party.

The freedom of the new sexual rites is echoed in Howard’s intellectual life. He conducts his seminars in the freewheeling style of his amorous exploits. He demolishes a traditional student, George Carmody, whose conventional views and behavior run counter to Howard’s. When Carmody threatens Howard’s status by appealing a failing grade to higher university officials, Howard beds Annie Calendar, who knows of the Carmody case and is a potential defender of Carmody. Academic abuse extends to campus activities, such as the rumored engagement of a racist speaker on campus. Ironically, the scientist dies the night before his controversial appearance.

Between October 2 and December 15, 1972, the dates of the two parties, the events of the novel fictionalize a generation of social change. The references at the beginning and end of the novel to Richard Nixon’s running for the presidency of the United States and then to his victory suggest that the tawdriness of the larger world has infected even those people who protest against it.

The Characters

Born and reared in the North of England, Howard Kirk has made his way up the educational and, consequently, social ladder in a class-conscious society. From his working-class origins, via grammar school and Leeds University, he has moved to the newest of higher educational institutions, the University of Watermouth, to the south of Leeds. The university may very well be like that at which the author himself teaches, the University of East Anglia in Norwich, Sussex. Having been graduated with a “first,” the English version of the American summa cum laude, Howard energetically and grittily patterns personal and academic life after the liberation sociology of the 1960’s. With unprincipled ferocity, he beds colleagues, colleagues’ wives, and students, applying the new religion as well to the classroom, department meetings, and other campus activities. With Machiavellian cunning, he seduces minds and bodies indiscriminately, encouraging all who come within his periphery to follow him into the brave new world.

As he enjoys his latest conquest, Miss Callendar, she murmurs, “Historical inevitability,” and he responds, “Marx arranged it.” Sociological justification for every experience becomes Howard’s uncompromising principle. It takes on Rabelaisian proportions in his liaison with Flora Beniform, who outplays Howard in his own game by doling out her favors only at her convenience. Otherwise, Howard manipulates the most prim of female colleagues or the most sex-starved of students, all in the name of a higher consciousness to which the new man is called. Indeed, the title of Howard’s book is The Coming of the New Sex.

His wife, Barbara, at first an approving partner in the “onward transactions of the historical process,” experiences an increasing uneasiness and, finally, desperation. Unlike Howard, she is not graduated with a “first.” Her sexual emancipation—in fact, both of their sexual liberations—begins innocently, with Hamid, a dark-eyed Egyptian student, whose purpose, Howard later rationalizes, “was to establish intimacy between the male parties . . . because of his culturally determined view of women.” Barbara and Howard constantly refer to this catalyst for their new lives as the “Hamid strategy.”

The strategy determines even their choice of a dilapidated home in a derelict section of Watermouth—the result of the powerful feeling of liberation. Barbara’s sexual rebirth takes her to London for “shopping” weekends, during which she enjoys a liaison with an actor. Eventually the affair ends, and at the Kirks’ second orgy, she puts her hand quietly through a window glass, hardly interrupting the saturnalia around her. Despite her liberation, evidenced in the confidence with which she greets guests with questions about which type of contraceptive they have brought, she is unable to divest herself of her social and moral origins as easily as can Howard. When she falls into her increasing fits of depression, he recommends a party, a Valium, participation in a demonstration (a “demo”), shooting a soldier, or bedding a friend.

Most negatively affected by the current sociological fashion are Henry and Myra Beamish, friends of the Kirks from their graduate school days at Leeds University. No longer having much in common, the Beamishes and the Kirks see one another only at the parties. As a result of her first taste of the new freedoms, Myra drinks more, talks in frenzied excitement, and announces her intention to leave Henry. Henry, like Barbara, injures himself as he breaks a window at a party.

Other characters represent significant “advanced” living patterns, Moira Millikin, Howard’s unorthodox colleague and unmarried mother, always carries her baby to class, “where it gurgles and chunters as she explains the gross national product....” Arriving behind Moira at the last party are the Macintoshes, each “bearing a baby in a carrycot.” Miss Callendar (“Annie” now) has discarded her prim dark suit and literally let down her hair. Melissa Todoroff, a visiting faculty member from New York, berates Howard for neglecting her and talks incessantly of the radical movement (in Berkeley, Columbia, and Vincennes).

Only George Carmody, the student who dares to wear a university blazer and to complain to the administration about Howard, joins the Beamishes as outsiders to the new consciousness.

Critical Context

From Frederic Raphael’s famous contemporary work Glittering Prizes (1976), about the lives of Cambridge-Oxford dons, to plays about seedier institutions such as the second-language school in Simon Gray’s Quartermaine’s Terms (1918) or the University of London in Gray’s Butley (1971), academia, still the major definer of class in England, has been the subject of many dramas and novels since World War II. Having written his first novel, Eating People Is Wrong (1959), about the Redbrick university of the 1950’s, Bradbury continues the tradition in The History Man.

Reviewers have mentioned the strong physicality of Bradbury’s style, particularly the endless lists of objects. George Steiner mentions the Homeric quality—lists and catalogs—and concludes with a comparison of Bradbury with Henry James, referring to the “density of convention, the same alertness to the flick of intonation.” The long lists of the furniture of the Kirks’ home, of the food served at the parties, of the separate routines of the Kirks as they prepare for a party, of the viciously detailed dress and general behavior of the guests, of the fashionable language— all these serve to create a thick textural tone of objects and language, at times providing subtle insights and at other times overwhelming with their sense of mass.

Hilary Spurling writes that she “cannot help feeling that inside this fat catalogue of very superior goods a thinner, sharper and altogether more disconcerting novel is struggling to get out.” The novelist Margaret Drabble sees the novel as immensely readable, and if it is about ideas, those ideas “are embodied in closely observed details—an apron, a chair, a conference room, an umbrella, ’an old party handbag from the days when there were party handbags.”’

Bradbury’s angle of vision is that of a disengaged sociologist creating a fictional world, utopian according to the modern impulses flowing from the radical-liberal actions of the 1960’s. It is bluntly obvious that he does not approve of this new world. In his use of the present tense, he progressively removes himself from the people about whom he writes. They are around him but not of him. He describes the characters as he does the buildings, with clinical detachment: “. . . the Kirks are, of course, enormously busy people, with two full lives, and two separate diaries,” and “the Kirks are, indeed, new people.”

American novels on academic life by writers such as John O’Hara, Saul Bellow, John Updike, and Joyce Carol Oates are many. One of these, Oates’s Unholy Loves (1979), emphasizes the private lives, with the satiric thrust subordinate to the individualization of characters. Bradbury’s vision, however, evokes the sterile world of Eugène Ionesco in part and, in part, the gigantism of a Francois Rabelais or a Federico Fellini.

Bibliography

Bradbury, Malcolm, ed. The Novel Today: Contemporary Writers on Modern Fiction, 1977.

Drabble, Margaret. Review in The New York Times Book Review. LXXIV (February 8, 1976), p. 3.

Spurling, Hilary. “Campus Mentis,” in The Times Literary Supplement. November 7, 1975, p. 1325.

Steiner, George. Review in The New Yorker. LII (May 3, 1976), p. 130.