The History Man (36 page)

Howard stands for a while longer, in the kitchen, slicing his hostly bread; then, the chore done, he walks back into his own party. It has changed, grown weak at the centre, active at the circumference. In the living room, where the main illumination is the flashing string of lights on the children's Christmas tree, there is torpor; a few people lie about, chatting, in varieties of intimacy. In the Victorian conservatory, there is desultory rhythmic dancing; junior members of faculty bounce and rock in the near darkness. In the dining room, the piles of bread and cheese stand in a state of neglect; Howard's dutiful ministrations are no longer needed. The party's momentum is clearly elsewhere, in nooks here and there, in the upper parts of the house, in the garden, perhaps even in the wasteland beyond. A few people are going, in the hail; there in the hall stands a figure wearing an anorak and a large orange backpack, from which protrude various large objects. ‘I'm off now, Howard,' says Felicity Phee. ‘Someone's giving me a ride to London. I've cleared out all my stuff.' ‘I'll see you next term,' says Howard. ‘I don't know whether you will see me next term,' says Felicity. ‘Haven't you sort of passed me up?' ‘Well, we'll meet in class,' says Howard. ‘I doubt it,' says Felicity. ‘I went to see Professor Marvin today, and asked him to find me a new teacher.' ‘Oh, I don't think he'll do that,' says Howard, ‘after the trouble with George Carmody.' Felicity looks at him; she says, ‘I really don't think you'd better stand in my way. I mean, I know as much as anyone about what happened with George Carmody. Do you plan to get rid of me too?' ‘Of course not,' says Howard. ‘Of course not,' says Felicity, ‘I know everything about you.' ‘What does that mean?' asks Howard. ‘I wanted to help you,' says Felicity. ‘I wanted you to recognize me.' ‘You did help me,' says Howard. ‘Okay, well, it didn't do me any good, did it?' asks Felicity. ‘You won and I didn't. So now just leave me alone.' ‘I will,' says Howard. ‘Well, do,' says Felicity. ‘Say goodbye to Barbara for me. If you can find her.'

The party can spare its host now, having become entirely self-made, as good parties must; a little later, Howard goes downstairs, into his basement study. The sodium light shines over the tops of the broken houses, penetrating stark orange designs onto the walls, the bookcases, the African masks. The street is empty of people; Howard draws the curtains. ‘So this is the scene of your many triumphs,' says someone coming down the stairs. ‘It's all right, Annie,' says Howard, ‘no one can see us. He's not there any more.' ‘I rather wish he was,' says Annie Callendar, coming into the study. ‘The critical eye.' ‘Is it strange to be on the inside?' asks Howard. ‘Yes,' says Annie, ‘I suppose I ought to be raking through your book.' ‘It's gone,' says Howard, ‘it's being printed.' Later on, under Howard on the cushions, Annie Callendar says: ‘I can't help thinking about him out there.' ‘He's gone, he's gone,' says Howard; and indeed Carmody has, fled weeks ago after a brief student sit-in – the banners said ‘Preserve academic freedom' and ‘Work for Kirk' – had demanded his expulsion, after the story of his campaign against Howard had become widely known. ‘I never knew whether you believed me, Howard,' says Annie Callendar. ‘I really didn't tell him.' ‘Tell him what?' asks Howard lazily. ‘You didn't tell him what?' ‘I didn't tell him what I saw that night,' says Annie. ‘You down here laying little Miss Phee.' ‘Of course I believed you,' says Howard. ‘Did you?' asks Annie. ‘Why?' ‘I know who did tell him,' says Howard. Annie stirs under him; she says, ‘Who did? Who'd do that?' Howard laughs and says, ‘Who do you think? Who else knew?' ‘Little Miss Phee?' says Annie Callendar. ‘That's it,' says Howard. ‘You're smart.' ‘But why should she?' asks Annie. ‘Why get you into trouble?' ‘You see, she wanted to help,' says Howard. ‘It's an odd way to help you,' says Annie. ‘I shan't help you like that.' ‘She thought like that,' says Howard. ‘What she said was, she wanted to defend me against the attacks of the liberal reactionary forces, and they needed something to attack me with so that she could defend me properly.'

‘It sounds a little crazy,' says Miss Callendar. ‘She is a little crazy,' says Howard. The party noise booms above their heads. Annie Callendar says, ‘When did you find out?' ‘Oh, I don't know,' says Howard. ‘Before he went?' ‘Yes, it was,' says Howard. ‘On the strength of that, you got rid of him,' says Annie Callendar. ‘Rose to your present radical fame on campus.' ‘He was an historical irrelevance,' says Howard. ‘Did you know before you came to see me that afternoon?' asks Annie Callendar. ‘I can't remember,' says Howard. ‘Of course you can remember,' says Annie, ‘you did.' ‘I may have done,' says Howard. ‘Did you plan it with her?' asks Annie. ‘Did you know all along?' ‘I think we discussed it,' says Howard. ‘But what was it for?' asks Annie. ‘I wanted you,' says Howard, ‘I just had to find a way to you.' ‘No,' says Annie, ‘that wasn't all. It was all a plot.' ‘I thought you liked plots,' says Howard. ‘In any case, it's the plot of history. It was simply inevitable.' ‘But you helped inevitability along a little,' says Annie. ‘There's a process,' says Howard. ‘It charges everyone a price for the place they occupy, the stands they take.' ‘You seem to travel free,' says Miss Callendar. ‘Some travel free,' says Howard, ‘some pay nice prices. You enjoy your price, don't you?' ‘Going to bed with you?' asks Miss Callendar. ‘Which was the real end in view,' says Howard. ‘No,' says Miss Callendar. ‘Ssshhh,' says Howard, ‘of course it was.' Up above, the party noise vibrates. A small trouble is taking place in the hall; Mrs Macintosh, holding one carrycot, stands facing Dr Macintosh, holding another. ‘You slipped upstairs with her,' she says, ‘and I was breastfeeding.' ‘The girl was crying,' says Dr Macintosh, ‘she was very upset.' ‘Right,' says Mrs Macintosh, ‘this is the last party you come to.'

But it is a small altercation, and down in the basement they do not hear it. Nor do they hear when, higher in the house, in a guest bedroom empty of Felicity's things, a window smashes. The cause is Barbara who, bright in her silvery dress, has put her right arm through and down, savagely slicing it on the glass. In fact no one hears; as always at the Kirks' parties, which are famous for their happenings, for being like a happening, there is a lot that is, indeed, happening, and all the people are fully occupied.

Welcome Back to
The History Man

by Malcolm Bradbury

Just over 30 years ago, I invented, for fictional purposes, a character who quite wonderfully turned into a long-lasting literary figure. His name was Howard Kirk, he was a radical university lecturer, and he appeared in a satirical novel called
The History Man
(1975). Howard, the ‘history man', then took on a splendid new lease of life when, after Mrs Thatcher had come to power, he was played by a magnetic and Zapata-moustached Anthony Sher in the BBC-TV dramatization of the story.

I say I invented Howard Kirk, and yet no character ever came my way more naturally. He was an entirely familiar figure on every modern campus – if, like me, you happened to teach in one of those bright concrete-and-glass new universities that sprang up over the Sixties in Britain, and right across Europe and the USA.

Most people then on campus knew a Howard Kirk. He was the easy-going left-wing lecturer from the Swinging Sixties who had seen it happen, seen it fail, and had to live through what came next: the Sagging Seventies. Always radical, always seductive, always seducing, he was eternally on the side of the students against the fascistic institution that paid his salary, and always against those who were over thirty, even if he was himself thirty-five.

Howard believed in history, progressive history, and where it was inevitably leading us. As he said, if you wanted to understand, you needed to know a little Marx, a little Freud, and a little history. Yet the subject he taught wasn't history at all, but something vastly more ‘trendy' (as everyone said then). Howard taught Sociology. And sociology was the most fashionable, radical and popular of all subjects in the academic canon of the day.

In new universities like mine it acquired special place, as one of those inter-locking, inter-disciplinary subjects that allowed us to widen and re-integrate the great map of learning. It united philosophy, political science, anthropology, economics, history, cultural and popular studies, literature and art in a spirit of quasi-scientific objectivity.

It was high theory, the most conceptual of subjects – and yet it was data-based, empirical, very hands on. It was a master subject, offering an over-arching account of all social phenomena, entire historical epochs or ideologies – yet it was fascinated by the topical and the ephemeral. It was a ‘value-free' approach to the world – yet it was also political. It stood beyond ideology, yet was a super-ideology.

Sociology had a glorious heyday in the Sixties and then began to fragment and die – not as a discipline among others, but as the great discipline, the key to all knowledge. In this process it seems I played a part. In an interesting article in the January issue of Prospect, ‘Return of Sociology', Ian Christie, deputy director of the think-tank Demos, says the turning point was clear.

It was the appearance of
The History Man
in 1975 that led to the backlash against sociology, when ‘Bradbury's demolition of his anti-hero's hypocrisies and pretensions was hailed as though he headed up an army relieving a city beseiged by Marxist academics.' In fact I had no armies, and even I don't believe novels make that kind of difference. But out went the baby with the bathwater, says Christie, and sociology has not really recovered its authority since.

I would naturally be sorry to feel I alone had done such irremediable damage to a subject I respect and consider a major component of learning. Sociology, I would be among the first to say, is a distinguished, historical, and very European form of study, whose origins go back to the Enlightenment – like much else that is good. It was shaped by great thinkers – Rousseau, Hegel, Comte, Mill, Durkheim, Weber – and, for good or ill, has much to do with human progress and social understanding.

Over the last two centuries, sociology sought to provide a comprehensive account of society, show models of how institutions work, compare our and other societies. It studied class, race, gender and ideology. It considered how and under what determining influences people thought (sociology of knowledge) and how they believed (the sociology of religion). It explored suicide, alienation, anomie, sport and advertising.

Yet something distinctive did happen to sociology between the 1950s and 1970s. The subject reached its heyday, particularly in Britain and the USA, and then quickly ran off into its decline. What must have become obvious to all parties was this was a sociological phenomenon in itself. Why, then, did sociology achieve such a central role in Britain and the USA in the postwar years, and why did its pretensions collapse later?

One explanation of the rise of sociology to its queen-bee role in the post-war map of learning was given by the left-wing American sociologist C. Wright Mills, author of influential books on the Power Elite and the Military-Industrial complex. In his 1959 book
The Sociological Imagination
, Mills claimed the sociological viewpoint was itself the product of the radical alienation that was one of the consequences of modernity.

‘Nowadays men often feel that their private lives are a series of traps,' the book begins. The modern individual came to see the world as ‘an outsider, a permanent stranger.' Individuals cease in the modern mass to feel like individuals; they feel themselves as part of a process, a mob. They struggle to understand the history in which they're trapped, but it is beyond comprehension: ‘The history that now affects every man is world history.'

Mills proposes the ‘sociological imagination' as a form of what we would call, in another hideous word culled from the wreckage, ‘empowerment'. He was offering, in a sense, a form of Marxism without a manifesto, a social critique in the form of a science, a view of history where history already is powered with a well-guided sense of where it's supposed to go.

Mills was right: his age had turned to the sociological viewpoint. It was the time of the embracing cultural analysis, the handy social textbook. Post-war society was different from prewar, and required new reporting. In Britain, at this time, Richard Hoggart was publishing
The Uses of Literacy
, Raymond Williams'
The Long Revolution
, the New Left analysing such forces of social change as youth culture, sport, pop music.

In the Fifties USA popular sociology flourished, as if the New World was being discovered anew. In the early 1950s David Riesman had published his remarkable study
The Lonely Crowd
, identifying a quite changed American identity in the age of urban mass society. Other key studies – such as Vance Packard's
The Hidden Persuaders
– portrayed Americans as docile, in the hands of commercial manipulators, deceived by their own leaders, driven to conformity and social consent.

The ‘sociological' reading of post-war society came after the massive crisis of world war and the growth of a new era of ideological conflict, the cold war. The mid-century crisis left earlier political thought discredited: Fascism disgraced, Marxist theory in a state of Stalinist stupefaction. Ideology itself was challenged, yet the intellectual apparatus of ideology – the study of society, class and politics – was in demand.

All over Europe, old societies were being reconstructed with new political orders. Old balances of power and borders of empire had collapsed. Newly emergent post-colonial societies were multiplying, some fledgling democracies, some various forms of people's republic. Above all, a new social order based on commodified mass capitalism was evolving in conflict with an opposite order, and the world was being rapidly transformed by economic and ideological forces that were constantly in conflict.