I have just been re-reading Malcolm Bradbury’s Eating People Is Wrong.
Well, a literal & technical re-reading – repeating what I had done soon after first publication in 1959 – so it came as a shock to find that I remember virtually nothing of it. The details have all got muddled up with other so-called campus novels of those years. I thought I remembered it as being one of those where the young English lecturer goes to America, which this one is not despite it being published soon after Bradbury returned from a stint at Indiana. It stays firmly based on an English provincial university.
This time I read 1976 edition (brought up from the library basement) which contains Bradbury’s own reflections in an introduction.
Frankly I don’t think I would have enjoyed it very much if coming to it fresh today. Not one of the characters attracts any sympathy or real interest from me – though I’m pretty sure I remember thinking them all rather alarmingly sophisticated half a century ago. It didn’t pass Philip Larkin’s three tests of a novel – “Do I believe it? Do I care? Will I go on caring?”
There is however a surprising amount of sex –none of it at all explicit of course in those days before the Lady Chatterley judgement. Anyway at sixteen I failed to recognise it, not only out of sheer naivety & ignorance, but also because the characters were all obviously too old for anything like that – the ‘hero’, Professor Treece, is almost forty.
I did enjoy it for the nuggets of social history.
Treece wonders if he is failing to live up to his professorial status by living in a somewhat seedy late-Victorian house, travelling by motorised bicycle, having an account with the Post office Savings Bank, going to an NHS doctor & wearing M&S pyjamas (foreshadowing Jeremy Paxman’s complaint about the cut of the crotch); paper back books were useful because you could afford so many more of them, though you had to go to the library to provide the reference from hard back edition for a scholarly paper.
I was prompted to re-read Eating People by reviews of the recently published volume of Larkin’s letters which allege that Treece’s fellow academic Dr Viola Masefield is a thinly disguised & rather cruel portrayal of Philip Larkin’s Monica.
Viola Masefield knew how to be modern by making dustbins look interesting, what to serve with shishkebabs, how high up to put her bosom this month & the best way to renovate old skis. She also knew “What to do with a mobile when it isn’t.” Only babies now have mobiles of the type referred to, but in the 1950s no fashionable drawing room would be complete without one. In a novel in which none of the characters is very admirable, I found it difficult to see Bradbury’s treatment of her as particularly unkind.
One episode of the book provides yet more evidence of the strange fascination being exerted by the coffee bar with its glass cups no bigger than eye baths. Treece was taken by a sociologist on a daring visit one night to the only such bar in the city, in a warehouse owned by a Pole. One of its main attractions was that it stayed open when everything else closed at half past ten. It had a skiffle group, one of whose guitarists was a genuinely aristocratic Earl, & ever so very contemporary furniture ‘for people with no leg below the knee joint & a short sharp spike for a bottom.’ The espresso machine was being operated by a Sikh ‘dressed in his native garb.’
Treece wondered if people could really afford a shilling for a cup of coffee.
Willoughby, the academic turned best-selling author, ponders the meaning of fame: you not only had to be someone, but to look as if you ere someone to attract the attention of the gossip columnists. He was also disappointed to find that he did not seem to share the special dispensation granted to artists, who could betray, deceive & ill-treat strings of women who still queued for their attention: ‘Willoughby ill treated & was cruel to his women, in twos & threes, & they hated it & him.’
I wonder how the Willoughbys felt when, in no time at all, their students were deserting academe for rock stardom.
Bradbury says that he thought he was writing a novel about the difficulties of being a liberal in the 1950s when literature seemed to have a significance in the new cultural economy & thus made reading English at university a prevalent moral passion. But this version of liberalism seemed singularly useless, consisting of letting others get on with their own strange lives & beliefs just so long as they did not upset yours, & gave you credit for the sympathy you felt, even though every Englishman knew that England was the country that God had got to first, properly.
And so Treece (& Bradbury?) prove completely unable to make real connection with the largely undifferentiated ‘Negroes’ in the book who are there just to cause embarrassment by, for example, demanding a ‘consecrated room’ in which to pray during a reception for International Students; & though Treece does his duty when Mr Eborebelosa becomes the victim of an attack by racist louts in the city, his fellow-feelings are not engaged.
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