Malcolm Bradbury - Doctor Criminale

So came the years of international fame, when he, and his books, appeared everywhere. His sales were said to rival Lenin’s in Russia, Confucius’s in China, Jacqueline Susann’s in the United States. When by the end of the Seventies ideological hostilities began to soften, and the certainties of the left began to fade, Criminale grew not less but more influential. Now he was going everywhere, meeting everyone. When the world, or just some particular philosophical congress, needed someone who stood in advance of Marxism, or bridged Materialism, Subjectivity and Deconstruction, they went, it seems, for Bazlo Criminale. He travelled as if frontiers were abolished; his books crossed the East-West divide as if it had never been there. He became a master of the conference lapel badge, a virtuoso of the plenary address. He consulted for the great international institutions: Comecon and UNESCO, the Stalin Peace Prize and the Nobel Peace Prize, the World Bank and the European Community. He became friend to presidents. He took vacations with Gorbachev, went to the opera with Mitterrand, played golf with Reagan, drank beer with Helmut Kohl, scoffed tea and scones with Margaret Thatcher. When he lectured at Stanford in California, three thousand people turned out to hear him conduct an obscure discussion of Mandelbrot’s Fractals. Honorary degrees and other state honours came his way; he also became fame itself at its most serious level. One week he was photographed with Shevardnadze at the Bolshoi, the next with Madonna at the Brown Derby, the next in an argonaut’s cap on the steam yacht of some Italian socialite, arm carelessly tossed round some topless nymph or other,. Aegean in the background.

So he had become the philosopher of the Nineties, the charismatic metaphysician of the age of the laptop and Chaos Theory, the philosopher who survived after the end of the old thinking. Finally, one evening, I put down Codicil’s difficult book, and reflected on what I’d more or less read. The more I thought about Bazlo Criminale, I realized, the more obscure and mysterious he now seemed. Upstairs Ros sat in the bath watching old videotapes. I climbed the stairs and went and spoke to her. ‘How can anyone please everyone all the time?’ I asked. ‘Get in, sonny, I’ll show you,’ said Ros. ‘I’m talking about Criminale,’ I said, ‘The man who is always praised for his devastating sense of order, his powers of logic. But I can’t say his life makes all that much sense to me.’ ‘Just forget Criminale for half an hour,’ said Ros, ‘Climb in, there’s plenty of room.’ ‘How can I forget Criminale?’ I asked, sitting down on the lavatory seat, ‘I’ve been living with this man for what seems like years.’ ‘A few days,’ said Ros. ‘And the more I think about him, the more I find out about him, the more he turns into a mystery.’ ‘What’s so mysterious?’ asked Ros, ‘He’s just a famous world intellectual and a hot-shot thinker of the Age of Glasnost.’

‘Fine, but what about the times before glasnost?’ I said, This is a man who comes out of the old Marxist world, where they didn’t mess about, believe me. There was right thinking and there was wrong thinking. If you started on the wrong kind they took your head off to make sure they stopped it.’ ‘It must have been more complicated than that,’ said Ros, They always had hardliners and dissidents.’ ‘All right, which of them was Criminale?’ I asked, This is a man who’s friends with Brezhnev and mates with Honecker. At the same time he’s hanging around with Kissinger and giving big lectures in the West.’ ‘I expect he was useful to both sides,’ said Ros. ‘Okay, how?’ I asked, ‘Was he an international emissary, a spy, what?’ ‘You’re overloading it, Francis,’ said Ros, ‘He was a famous philosopher who was above all those things. Like Jean-Paul Sartre. He went everywhere.’ This is a man who likes high living,’ I said, ‘He stays at some of the best hotels in the West. The Badrutt’s Palace in Saint Moritz, for instance. Where they charge you a monkey for just letting you turn the revolving doors.’

‘Well, wouldn’t you, if you could?’ asked Ros. ‘Of course,’ I said, The point is I couldn’t. This is a man from a poor world who lives like a prince. It’s almost as if some great international foundation had been set up especially for him.’ ‘Lecture fees, royalties from his books,’ said Ros. ‘All right, let’s take his books,’ I said, ‘Half of them were banned in Russia, but they still managed to appear all over the place.’ ‘He had to publish them abroad,’ said Ros. ‘But if they didn’t like them, why didn’t they freeze his bank accounts, take away his citizenship, put him in jail?’ ‘Maybe he was too famous abroad,’ said Ros. ‘You can always stop someone becoming famous abroad,’ I said, ‘Forbid him to travel, for one thing. They never did that.’ ‘Maybe he had friends in high places,’ said Ros, ‘Maybe they liked him to have a high reputation abroad but were careful of what he said back home. The Cold War was filled with these funny games. Or maybe they did forbid him to travel, put him in prison, and you just haven’t found out about it.’

‘All right, but it doesn’t say so in Codicil,’ I said. ‘Why should Codicil know all that much about it?’ asked Ros, ‘He’s just some Austrian prof. Anyway, you may not have read it right. You know your German’s hopeless.’ ‘It was, it’s been getting better by the minute,’ I said, ‘I still think the whole thing is pretty damn strange.’ ‘It’s just the same as Brecht and Mann and Lukacs,’ said Ros, ‘All those great figures who tried to be on both sides of the fence. They were survivors, Francis. They learned how to play the political game and still stay serious. Maybe that’s what a modern master really is. Someone who learns to swim with the flow, turn with the tide. But still bends history to his own advantage, so he can still do something. I want to do something. Let’s go to bed.’ ‘I’m sorry, Ros,’ I said, ‘I still haven’t done the treatment. And Lavinia needs it tomorrow. I’m going to have to work all night.’ ‘I want you in bed,’ said Ros. ‘I’m sorry, Ros, really,’ I said, ‘But for a man’s whole life, what’s one night?’ ‘You bastard,’ said Ros.

And so, right through the night, full to the brim and more with Bazlo-Criminale, I tried to put his life into some sort of shape, his story into some sort of order. From time to time Ros thumped angrily on the floor of the room above, but I bravely resisted all sexual temptation. Everything Lavinia had asked for I tried to provide: the life, the loves, the friends, the enemies, the peaks, the troughs, the history, the settings, the fleshy human being from whom the thought emerged. I plotted and planned it, topped and tailed it, edited and word-processed it, bound and ribboned it. And whatever I explored, wherever I looked, Criminale seemed more obscure and enigmatic than ‘ever. So, the job done at last, I labelled it on the cover ‘The Mystery of Doctor Criminale’, and handed it to Ros when she descended to breakfast in the morning, in very testy mood.

‘You didn’t come to bed at all,’ she said. ‘No, but I finished it,’ I said. ‘This is it?’ she said, glancing it over, ‘It’s a very full treatment.’ ‘It’s a very full life,’ I said. ‘More than thirty pages,’ said Ros, not reading but simply turning over the sheets, ‘Lavinia said no more than ten.’ ‘You try getting a remarkable man like Criminale down to ten,’ I said, ‘Aren’t you going to read it?’ ‘Haven’t time,’ said Ros, ‘I just hope you made it all perfectly understandable. Arts commissioning editors don’t know about ideas, only noise and pictures. All they do is listen to pop groups and go to art openings all the time.’ ‘I’ve cut down on most of the ideas,’ I said, ‘It’s nearly all about his mysterious life.’ ‘Does he have a mysterious life?’ asked Ros. ‘Yes, I told you last night,’ I said, ‘A life of contradictions, blanks, and deceptions.’ ‘Okay, Francis, I don’t have time to argue,’ said Ros, ‘Just call me a taxi and I’ll take it to the bitch. Oh, and since you haven’t anything to do today, could you chop the courgettes for when I get back?’