Malcolm Bradbury: Doctor Criminale

‘I don’t want to,’ I said. ‘What, live?’ asked Ros, ‘I’m not surprised, after what you swilled down last night at the Groucho. Never mind, it will look better after breakfast.’ ‘I don’t want breakfast,’ I said. ‘There’s something you’d rather do instead of breakfast?’ asked Ros. I looked at her; she looked frankly at me. ‘You ought to be at work,’ I said. ‘I told you, I’m an independent,’ said Ros, ‘That means I do it my way. So why don’t we do it my way?’ So we did, in fact, do it her way, which was quite an athletic and unusual way. And that, as it happens (and that is more or less how it happened), is how I came to spend the next months of my chaotic young life wandering the world in pursuit of Doctor Bazlo Criminale.

Now to this day, this very day, I have no very clear idea of why – in those difficult weeks after the Booker, when my whole journalistic career collapsed, and I housesat (and a good deal more) for Ros – my fate and fortunes, life and future, became so inextricably involved with those of Doctor Bazlo Criminale. I had heard of Criminale, naturally; who has not? In the last few years his name has shown up everywhere. One week they’re profiling him in Vanity Fair , the week after in Viz and Marie-Claire . But I knew him the way most of us know of those big public figures who raise our interest, maybe our hackles – through the interface of print, that perfect technology for letting us keep company with those whose lives or actions make us curious but whose faces we have no wish to see, whose destinies we have no desire to share.

In short, Criminale was the text, and I was the decoder. He was an author, and I was a reader. Now I belong, as I’ve already said, to the age of the Death of the Author. According to the rules of my excellent education, writers don’t write; they are written, by language, by the world outside, but above all by us, the sharp-eyed readers. The word Criminale, the sign Criminale, the signature on the spine Criminale – that was more than enough for me. I had him there, a text, and had no wish to go further with him, no intention of doing so. So, I repeat, just how did I become so involved – so ridiculously and inextricably involved – with Doctor Bazlo Criminale?

There was certainly nothing in the ordinary logic of things likely to bring us together. He was a great international figure, the man known as the philosopher for our times, the Lukacs of the Nineties; I was an out-of-work hack from the provinces. He was one of the superpowers of contemporary thought; I was a pygmy from Patagonia. He was the keynote speaker, I was the footnote or appendix. Seemingly no great congress of world writers, no international meeting of intellectuals devoted to whatever it might be (world peace, human rights, the survival of the ecosphere, the future of photography), no high-level diplomatic reception to celebrate some new treaty of cultural friendship and co-operation, was complete without the presence of Criminale; I of course was never invited. Here was a man who measured out his life in summit conferences, ministerial receptions, congress programmes, Concorde take-off times; my main travelling adventures were attempts to get to work on the decrepit Northern line. While he travelled the world in the best interests of modern thought, staying at grand hotels the Villa d’Este in northern Italy, Badrutt’s Palace Hotel in Saint Moritz – of such splendour that even the chambermaids had been finished in Switzerland and the desk clerks had degrees from the Sorbonne, my idea of luxury was a bottle of aftershave for Christmas. No, there seemed little or nothing that could possibly link together the lives of Bazlo Criminale and myself.

Even so, over the next few days, as I began to research the man for the one-hour programme in the arts documentary series ‘Great Thinkers of the Age of Glasnost’ that Nada Productions – the small independent company that Ros ran with, as she put it, ‘my big friend Lavinia’ – was offering to Eldorado Television, I naturally came to know him better. These were not easy days, I assure you. No cheque came from my collapsed newspaper. There was no word of compassion, never mind compensation, from the Official Receiver who had so kindly taken over its troubled affairs. Luckily I had Ros’s offer of bed and board – though the board was, it became very apparent, completely dependent on the bed. Each night Ros would claim her rental in the great gymnasium of her bedroom, where her experiments in revisionist gender-pairing and new theories of orgasm proved remarkably demanding. Ros was one of those people who believe that the outer parameters of sex have still not been entirely discovered yet. Each morning she would rise refreshed, to water the houseplants, feed the armadillo, and set off, bright as a new BMW, for Soho and the small one-room offices of Nada Productions.

And each day, a little more weary from what had so refreshed her, I sat down in the country kitchen of the town house in the Bangladeshi district behind Liverpool Street station to set to work on my new career: reading and noting, sifting and filing, computing and scrolling, trying to find my way around and into the complicated and mythical figure of Bazlo Criminale. Each evening, fresh and bracing as an arctic storm, Ros would return, bearing yet more books and journals, photos and clippings, files and faxes, by or about or otherwise pertaining to our subject. Next we would consume the oven-ready vegetarian low-cholesterol pastas I had slipped out to buy during the afternoon, and then retire to the upstairs laboratory for yet more advanced physical research.

Then each next day I would get up, feeling a little less whole than before, and return to my other duty, the probing and pushing and plotting and planning that took me just a little closer to the mysterious world of Bazlo Criminale. Small wonder that before long I began to feel like one of those nameless non-heroes that live in Samuel Beckett’s novels – a hermit of thought, a tired scribe whose every written word is each day collected and taken away by some higher power, a worn and lifespent soul whose every recollection and every bodily juice has somehow been squeezed out and extracted for use elsewhere. And so it went on, day after day for a week or two or three. There was myself, there was Ros, and there was the paper figure of Doctor Criminale.

Now if you read at all – and of course you must do, or you wouldn’t be here with me in the first place – you too have probably heard of Criminale. For if you read, he writes; oh, how he writes, or has written. In fact ‘writing’ seems far too small a word to describe the output of forty years that has spurted from his pen, too petty by far to define the prodigious mental energy, the overwhelming intellectual ambition, that had kept him in endless creation, far too simple a term to denote the output of works that stand stacked in the bookstores from Beijing to Berkeley, to the point where he must surely soon be due his own Dewey Decimal classification. Nothing reduced his output. No matter how far he travelled, how often he lectured, how many congresses he attended, he wrote, and was never silenced. Stories tell us that since he was seventeen he usually produced a poem a day, and probably a journalistic article too. And since then, just as he had seemed to visit every country, so he appeared to have visited every literary form: the novel and the philosophical treatise, the play and the travel essay, the epic poem and the economic tract. And if this were not enough, his photographic studies of the late modern nude are acknowledged everywhere (see the recent exhibition in Dresden, with Susan Sontag writing the exhibition catalogue). We are talking here about an all-round man.