Should 'The History Man’ be bracketed with ‘1984’ and 'Brave New World' as a brilliant warning of what is to come?
Read Peter Hitchens only in The Mail on Sunday
I try to read '1984' and 'Brave New World' every two years or so, and each time I do, they yield up new meanings. But I had not opened the late (alas) Malcolm Bradbury's extraordinary novel for some time, and had lost my own copy. Then, on the very day that I decided to seek it out again, I found it in a second-hand bookshop (these days much the best place to find interesting books), immediately began to read and could not stop.
It is an astonishing work of description and of prophecy. The plateglass university world of the early 1970s, in which I lived, is recalled with relentless accuracy - the architecture, the language, the mannerisms, the beliefs, the way it felt. It transports me straight back to York in the days of Ted Heath, and would -I think - do the same for those who experienced Sussex, East Anglia, Warwick and Lancaster around the same time.
But it is much better even than that. It sees that world as it was then, but as I would see it now rather than as I viewed it at the time. Suddenly, the real character of what I heedlessly watched and did is explained with cold and unsympathetic clarity. And it repeats a curious experience I had when I revisited the York campus in the mid-1980s, more than a decade after I had graduated. Back in 1970, the prefab buildings around their plastic-bottomed lake, with their relaxed sexual (and other) rules and the almost total absence of anything old or dark or stern, had been a sort of 'progressive' oasis in a Britain that was still remarkably old-fashioned. Many of the changes - the abolition of grammar schools, the mergers of police forces, entry to the Common Market, destruction of the old counties and boroughs, compulsory metrication, colour TV, cloning of high streets and standardisation of pubs - had either not yet happened or were only just beginning to bite.
Nearly 20 years later, the university had barely changed at all (it even smelled the same) but the rest of Britain had become much more like the York campus. Bright, new, cuboid buildings had replaced old, shadowy, classical and Gothic ones, informal eating had replaced formal meals, swearwords had become common in conversation, clothes were invariably casual, the background music was almost always rock rather than classical, and attitudes towards sex and drugs were relaxed.
I still remember a rather symbolic winter week in early 1971, when Britain simultaneously replaced the old town gas, (made from coal) and got rid of its ancient pounds, shillings and pence coinage, switching to a boring decimal system. The old gas had to be burned out of the mains, and strange devices, a bit like Armada beacons, were set up in the drear brick back streets of York, where the old coal gas flared through the drizzly night, turning the metal of the burners red hot. It was as if they were holding a funeral for the Industrial Revolution.
The following morning was Decimal Day, when we all had to begin to use the funny coins that everyone called pee, or possibly 'pence', and never 'pennies' - because we all knew that a penny was a large disc of worn copper, with a seated Britannia on one side - with the date just beneath her - and a King (or Queen’s) head on the other. These old pennies placed history in our pockets, because many of them were a hundred years old, often polished so smooth by your forebears that you could hardly read them, and a typical handful would bear the heads of the older Victoria, Edward VII, George V and George VI, each with the full Latin inscription (D.G. Omn Brit, Fid Def) giving their titles as monarchs by the Grace of God of all Britain, Defender of the Faith. The older ones were also 'Ind Imp’, emperors or empresses of India. On a lucky day you might also get a 'Bun Penny', with the lovely image of the younger, girlish Victoria, her hair in a bun (hence the name, though you could also once have bought a currant bun for one of these, and in Victoria's days half a dozen buns). These were replaced by dull, tiresome 'new pennies' which looked like American cents, and useless half new pennies, only introduced in an unsuccessful attempt to pretend that the new money wouldn't stoke up inflation by 'rounding up'. These stuck to your fingers and, while useful as emergency screwdrivers, never gained anyone's affection. Also, inflation duly made them worthless with amazing speed.
We also waved goodbye to the half-crown, that lovely coin decorated with a specially elegant version of the Royal Arms, which (in its older versions) contained so much silver that if you rubbed it on your sleeve it would shine like jewellery, and made any child feel rich when he had it in his pocket.
Somebody said on this blog the other day that most people wouldn't know what I meant when I talked of a 'cultural; revolution'. Well, perhaps not. But I cannot please everybody. The phrase is a reference to the collective destructive madness encouraged by Mao in China in 1967. But, oddly enough, I think quite a lot of people know, instinctively, what it means when they hear it applied to Britain. They know that this country, between about 1962 and about 1975, underwent so many changes that it amounted to a revolution, and they don't recall being asked if they wanted them. Malcolm Bradbury's book gives some idea of what part of it was like.
When 'The History Man' opens in October 1972 in the fictional southern English town of Watermouth, this revolution is still only half-complete. But that is not the fault of Howard Kirk, its central character (played by Anthony Sher in a questionable BBC TV version of the story in 1980). He is hurrying things along as fast as he can. Kirk, and his wife Barbara, are both grammar school products who might in the current egalitarian age never have made it into the middle class because their hopes would have been destroyed by bad education.
"Here were two people who had grown up, though in two different Northern towns, one in Yorkshire and one in Lancashire, in the same class and value background. That background was one of vestigial Christianity and inherited social deference...they came, both of them, from well-conducted and more or less puritanical home, located socially inn that perplexing borderland between working-class anarchism and lower-middle-class conformity. These were Chapel families, with high ethical standards and low social expectations".
The book is mostly the story , sparely written and mockingly cruel to most of its characters, of a few short days, of a horrible party, of the Kirks' own infidelities and especially of Howard's disgraceful abuse of his position, both as sexual predator and merciless, troublemaking commissar and thought policeman. It contains a devastating description of the preoccupations of the left-wing classes, right down to the organic food (it is amazing that anyone had heard of it back then, but they had) which still strikes home more than 30 years after it was written. But it also explores the personal history of the Kirks, their awakening into the monsters they have become, triggered by Barbara's brief affair. Anyone who thinks that the sexual revolution can be separated from the social and political one should read this account. The new politics are all about licensing selfishness, in bed and out of it.
All the morally good people in the book are hopeless, eccentric and eventually defeated. Howard's old friend Henry Beamish, a luckless man to whom accidents happen quite mercilessly, has the best speech in the book, and the finest moment (which you can discover for yourselves). The speech comes after Howard Kirk gives his Marxist-Freudian view of the problems in Henry's marriage.
"God", says Henry "The Kirk consultancy parlour. I'm out of all that now...I've stopped wanting to stand up and forge history with my penis. And I'm rather sick of the great secular dominion of liberation and equality we were on about then, which reduces, when you think about it, to putting system over people and producing large piles of corpses...I don't want to blame anyone now, or take anything off anyone. The only thing that matters for me is attachment to other knowable people, and the gentleness of relationship."
He gets this sneering reply from Howard Kirk. "Well, that's what we all want, isn't it? ...sweetness and light and plenty of Mozart. But we can't have it..."
Actually Howard Kirk wants nothing of the sort. He feeds on rancour. He sells personal gossip in return for sexual favours. He contrives to get a controversial geneticist invited to the university, in the justified hope that the student left will shout him down. He corrupts and debauches Miss Callendar, an English lecturer who at the start of the book seems to be his match, but collapses when taken by storm. This sad moment is the most miserable in the book, and actually unbelievable, because Miss Callendar has up till then been strongly armoured against Howard Kirk's wiles. But while it is personally incredible, it is politically true. Conservative forces in the civilised West have almost always caved in to attacks from the radical left.
But perhaps even worse is Kirk's vendetta against one of his students, George Carmody, destroyed because he refuses to follow Kirk's left-wing approach to the subject. The abuse of power here is described in a way that is terrifying and again, superficially, rather unbelievable. Could anyone, claiming to be a radical fighting for freedom, possibly behave like this? The answer, as we have seen across the university campuses of the western world for the last 30 years, is that yes, they can and do. Nor is it only academics who have adopted this merciless intolerance. Carmody tries, rather resourcefully, to defend himself. But he is relying on the world continuing to enforce the moral opinions it pretends to hold.
This is why I call the book prophetic. In 1972 or 1975, civilised people might have imagined that the Howard Kirks were a brief, unpleasant fashion isolated on a few plate-glass university campuses and bound to be defeated by superior reason and the gigantic forces of goodness. The Yom Kippur war of 1973, and the darkening effect that had after the frivolous bright lights and febrile prosperity of the 1960s (which in my view lasted from 1963 to 1973, in spirit), did at one stage seem to have put an end to the radical dream.
But it has not been so. Lacking any rallying point, and any belief beyond poor Henry Beamish's desire to cultivate a peaceful, kindly garden, the forces of civilisation have stepped back, and back, and back again, until there is very little left and there will soon be even less. I am very grateful to the late Auberon Waugh for relentlessly publicising this extraordinary book, amongst all his other insights. I'd like to pass on the favour. Please read it.
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