Malcolm Bradbury: Doctor Criminale

But I shouldn’t like you to think that these odd snatches of event and these poor scraps of wisdom are all I took away from my confused, confusing quest for Bazlo Criminale. How to explain? The problems of an ordinary young man, not particularly good at life, not much good at love either, pretty ignorant of the past, rather too soaked in living in the present, not greedy but needing to earn a crust, should not be under-estimated. Times change, and I suppose we all live between two worlds – the old bitter human history with its fair share of crimes and wrongs, the bland and apparently historyless present, which serves us well enough. Our own times never seem to have a name, but we are all made by something: we find and fight the particular ghosts of our day. They say we live in a renascent period, a time of quickening, an age of the new. Well, here I am, ready, a good Euro-person, in my green tracksuit and my Reebok trainers.

One day I met a good and famous man who was almost certainly bad. He came from somewhere in the past to tell one kind of story, and I am here to tell another. He was the writer, and I was the reader – though, as I read him, I couldn’t help thinking he was reading me. He was a doyen of culture; I was an on-the-hoof consumer of it. When he spoke, he summoned great powers; I tried to listen, but I heard only so much, for ours, you know, is an age of noise. He was a monumental statue; I was a pigeon in the park. He belonged to a finished era; I come from one that seems hardly to have got started yet. I chased him, for a time, but there are other things to do with life than walk in the dirtied tracks of other people’s stories. I can’t say I’ve totally given up the quest for Bazlo Criminale. Perhaps that is because, as he told me, his story’is also somehow mine. Now and then I wonder, if I was ever put to it, whether I or anyone like me could summon up greater moral powers than he did and didn’t in his own particular day. I know at best this is doubtful, at worst a vain delusion, usual in every new generation before it really sees the size of its job. If history (which we now call life-style) should happen to come calling, demanding a signature or a commitment, I should probably sign anything, like most of us. As far as I can see (which is not very far), few of us have worked up enough of a self to resist giving in, giving up, going over. Naturally I would always be tolerant, sceptical, permissive, pragmatic, good-hearted, open, late liberal. I would also assume nothing is true or certain; no ideology, philosophy, sociology, theology any better than any other. Life for me would therefore be a spectacle, a shopping mall, an endless media show, in which everything – amusing or grotesque, erotic or repulsive, heroic or obscene, sentimental or shameful – is an acceptable world-view, and anything could happen. There would be no great wisdom, and no great falsehood. A mule would be the equal of a great professor. Or so, I seem to remember, they say in Argentina.