Authors: Malcolm Bradbury
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, 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.’
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 through 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 a 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 on 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 it, 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 born 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 time 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 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 Wrocław, 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.