To the Hermitage

PICADOR

Introduction by David Lodge

Malcolm Bradbury was my oldest and closest writer-friend, and his death in the year 2000, at much too early an age, took away a vital part of my professional as well as my private life. Our careers were so closely entwined, especially in the early years, that without that relationship my own might have been less interesting and less rewarding. We first met as young lecturers appointed to the English Department at the University of Birmingham, I in 1960, Malcolm a year later, and we quickly became friends, as did our wives, Mary and Elizabeth. We had much in common. Grammar-school boys and first-generation graduates, of University College London and Leicester University respectively, not Oxbridge, we were both interested in modern literature and critical theory, had published first novels, were working on second ones, and aimed to combine academic careers with creative writing (at a time when the latter was not on the curriculum of any British university). Malcolm was a few years older than me and already firmly established in the literary world. His debut novel
Eating People is Wrong
had caused more of a stir than
The Picturegoers
, and he was a regular contributor to newspapers and magazines on a cultural spectrum that ran from
Punch
to the
Critical Quarterly.
His confident professionalism and readiness to turn his hand to any literary task, moving effortlessly from one stylistic register to another, impressed me and inspired emulation.

Encouraged by him to develop the comic strain in my writing, hitherto somewhat muted, I placed a few sketches in
Punch
myself, and in 1963 collaborated with him and a gifted Birmingham undergraduate, Jim Duckett, to write a satirical revue in
Beyond the Fringe
mode, which was commissioned by the Birmingham Rep on the strength of the artistic director’s acquaintance with Malcolm and his work. I have happy memories of hilarious script-writing sessions, Jim and I improvising as we paced up and down in Malcolm’s office while he pounded out our lines on an upright typewriter, improving them as he did so. I’m not sure that writing was ever such fun again. When I published my third novel,
The British Museum Is Falling Down
, in 1965 I dedicated it: ‘To Malcolm Bradbury (whose fault it mostly is that I have tried to write a comic novel).’

I wrote that book in the academic year of 1964–65 when I was in the USA with my family on a Harkness Fellowship, getting acquainted with American literature, which was Malcolm’s academic specialism. While I was away he was head-hunted by the new University of East Anglia at Norwich, which offered him a senior lectureship with the prospect of a professorial chair before long, and the opportunity to design an American Studies programme from scratch. It was a tempting proposition, but he was happy at Birmingham and hesitated over the decision. I wrote him a long letter, on one of those flimsy blue aerogrammes that were the principal means of transatlantic communication in those days, putting all the arguments in favour of his staying in Birmingham. He wrote back that I was probably right, but he was now too committed to withdraw. I replied: ‘Oh Malcolm, how could you do it? . . . We’re really desolated that you won’t be in Brum when we get back.’ As the plural pronoun indicated, it wasn’t just the daily contact as colleagues, the literary collaborations, the exchange of ideas and recommendations of new books, that I would keenly miss, but also the central part Malcolm and Elizabeth had played in the social life of Mary and myself in Birmingham.

Deeply as I regretted Malcolm’s departure at the time, it is obvious in retrospect that, as our careers developed, we could not have continued comfortably as colleagues in the same department – both writing novels that were very often about academic life, both having much the same sense of humour, and both drawing on the same milieu for ‘material’. Even when we lived and worked in different places, we were frequently, and sometimes farcically, confused, often congratulated on writing each other’s books, and in receipt of mail initially addressed to the wrong university. Once I was rung up by a man who asked me to settle a bet by revealing whether I was the same writer as Malcolm Bradbury. We became, in a Stoppardian sense, the Rosencrantz and Guildenstern of contemporary English letters. The confusion was compounded by the fact that from 1975 onwards we had the same publisher. When to my surprise and disappointment my novel
Changing Places
was rejected by three publishers, Malcolm, having read it, suggested I send it to Tom Rosenthal, head of his own publishers, Secker & Warburg, who accepted it and published it very successfully. I have been with Secker ever since. There is inevitably an element of competition between writers who operate in the same zone of the literary world even when they are close friends, and not many would have the generosity Malcolm showed in encouraging me to join his own publisher’s list.

We continued to see each other at intervals after he moved to Norwich – at conferences, book launches, literary festivals, British Council seminars, and similar events. We exchanged regular weekend visits and shared a couple of holidays in France. In the summer term of 1977 I was Henfield Fellow at UEA, associated with the enormously successful MA programme in creative writing that Malcolm co-founded with Angus Wilson and directed for many years. Our friendship remained firm, but we did not exchange information about each other’s work in progress as freely as we had in the past, both perhaps wishing to avoid being influenced or unsettled by knowing too much about it. It is very interesting therefore that each of us decided quite independently to steer our narrative writing in a new direction at about the same time, and took the same generic route: the biographical novel about an historical writer. My novel
Author, Author
was written after Malcolm’s death, but I first made a note about the relationship between Henry James and George Du Maurier as the possible subject for a novel in 1995, before I discovered that Malcolm was writing one about Denis Diderot, the French encyclopaedist, versatile man of letters and prominent figure of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment, eventually published in 2000 as
To the Hermitage.
Up to that point both of us had written novels set exclusively in our own lifetime.

We were, however, propelled in this direction by the zeitgeist. Towards the end of the last century and in the first decade of the present one an increasing number of literary novelists published books which applied the techniques of fiction, especially its rendering of subjective consciousness, to the life stories of past writers, and it was my ironic fate to discover that several of us were working more or less simultaneously on Henry James. I have written about the phenomenon in the title essay of my book,
The Year of Henry James
– about the possible reasons for the sudden popularity of this hybrid genre, its controversial status, and the different forms it can take. The form of Malcolm’s bio-novel is very different from mine, but there are certain interesting correspondences. Both, for instance, end with the death of the main character and are full of reflections on what Malcolm’s narrator calls ‘Postmortemism’ – whether, for instance, the life of books after the death of their author can compensate for the disappointments and frustrations of a literary vocation, or indeed for the irreducible fact of death itself.

In
To the Hermitage
this theme is explored in a variety of ways, among them a number of humorous anecdotes about the bizarre or mysterious fates of the actual corpses of writers like Descartes, Voltaire, and Sterne. Lawrence Sterne is the genius whose invoked spirit hovers over
To the Hermitage
.
The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy
, published serially from 1759 to 1767, was arguably the first metafictional anti-novel, wittily demonstrating the impossibility of encompassing the infinite connectedness of human experience within the confines of a book (the narrator, drawn into endless digressions, fails even to get himself born in the first volume) but turning that failure into an unconventional triumph of literary art. Sterne’s contemporary Denis Diderot was so impressed by it that he paid it the compliment of imitation in his
Jacques the Fatalist
. The two writers met when Sterne visited France, and became friends. Sterne presented Diderot with the first six volumes of
Tristram Shandy
, which had an honoured place in Diderot’s extensive personal library.

Catherine the Great, in the period of her reign when she aimed to bring the culture of the Enlightenment to backward Russia, bought that library from its indigent owner on very generous terms, had it transported to, and installed in, her Winter Palace in St Petersburg, and persuaded the ageing and ailing encyclopaedist to spend several months at the Hermitage as a kind of court philosopher. That story, which Malcolm probably first came across in P. N. Furbank’s fine biography of Diderot published in 1992, was the primary inspiration for his novel, but the personal connection between Diderot and Sterne may have suggested how he would present and develop it.
To the Hermitage
has a frame story set in the present day which owes something to Sterne’s other, slighter but cherished classic,
A Sentimental Journey
, based on the author’s travels in France, which he relates in the persona of Parson Yorick (a character in
Tristram Shandy
), interweaving descriptions, reflections, and piquant personal encounters, and teasing the reader with uncertainty about how autobiographical and how serious the ‘real’ author is being. In
To the Hermitage
an unnamed narrator, who corresponds in many ways to Malcolm Bradbury, but never admits to being he, joins an oddly mismatched group of people making a pilgrimage by ferry from Stockholm to St Petersburg in the late autumn of 1993 under the aegis of the so-called ‘Diderot Project’ organized by a Swedish professor and his bossy wife, who seem to be the only ones who understand what it is. The narrator’s own project, however, is to see Diderot’s library and pay homage to the great Encyclopaedist. The story of this trip, which contains many Shandean digressions, aporias, jokes, and aphoristic reflections, is told in chapters which alternate with those of the parallel story of Diderot’s journey to St Petersburg, his residence there, his meetings with Catherine, and his return to Paris.

When a writer’s work takes a radical and unexpected new direction, his or her regular readers are not always delighted – in fact they seldom are. Anyone who approaches
To the Hermitage
expecting a book as gripping and tightly constructed as, say,
The History Man
, is going to be disappointed. I confess to having enjoyed it much more on a second reading, when I was prepared for the kind of book it is – a Shandean novel, digressive, essayistic, wrongfooting the reader with gaps and anticlimaxes, tantalizing her with hints of amorous entanglements that are never confirmed, indulging in authorial reminiscences, describing places and crowds in exhaustive lists of minute particulars, the verbal equivalent of a Breughel painting, and switching abruptly between expansive narration and transcribed speech. The conversations between Diderot and Catherine are rendered entirely in dialogue between ‘HE’ and ‘SHE’, laid out like a play text, with the occasional stage direction, but they are not dramatic in the sense of forwarding the plot, creating suspense or mystery – they are discursive and dialectical. The characters bat philosophical and political ideas back and forth in language that doesn’t distance the issues by any attempt at ‘period’ authenticity (one is occasionally reminded of Shaw’s plays about great historical figures). These chapters are perhaps the most disconcerting feature of
To the Hermitage
to a reader expecting a conventional novel, but their form is not arbitrary – Diderot used the same device extensively in his novels and non-fiction writings, drawing on the tradition of the philosophical Dialogue that goes back to Plato.

In short, to enjoy
To the Hermitage
, readers must be patient, not rushing to find out what happens next, but allowing themselves to be carried along at the book’s own leisurely pace, on its own meandering course. On the way they will acquire a good deal of interesting information about an important era of Continental European cultural and political history, entertainingly conveyed and easily digested. They will encounter many descriptive
tours de force
– for instance the evocation of the slums of St Petersburg on page 326, or of the city encased in snow and ice in deep midwinter on page 397. They will be diverted by humorous caricatures of foreign manners which were always a Bradbury speciality (notices in a Swedish hotel room enjoin occupants to ‘Use only official soaps, and use your towels for at least two days. Condoms and the Holy Bible are provided in your bedside drawer for your physical and spiritual content and protection’). The narrator’s quest for Diderot’s library ends in a sense anticlimactically, but it is a satisfyingly appropriate conclusion to the frame story, while the account of Diderot’s accident-prone return journey to Paris, his eager renewal of contacts with his literary peers in spite of rapid physical decline, and his eventual death, is vividly written and deeply moving, acquiring an extra pathos from the circumstance that Malcolm himself died in the year
To the Hermitage
was published.