When McEwan met Bradbury
Joseph Williams on the birth of the creative writing course
When, in October 1970, Ian McEwan entered the Maids Head hotel — a sprawling, 13th century palimpsest which stands opposite the grounds of Norwich Cathedral — he had no idea what would come next.
He knew, as he squeezed between tables with a creased typescript of his first short story folded under one arm, that he was there to meet the comic novelist Malcolm Bradbury. He was less sure what Bradbury might make of the story: a deranged dramatic monologue titled ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’. But neither of them could have known, as they sat in a brown room, with brown pints, and Bradbury’s brown pipe filled with dusty tobacco, just how far this endeavour would go, how important Creative Writing courses would become.
In the five decades since that first supervision, Creative Writing in the UK has expanded rapidly from two men sat in a hotel bar in Norwich, to a subject offered at more than a hundred and twenty universities. What began as a one-year postgraduate degree has become an undergraduate course in its own right: in 27 universities students can now take a BA in Creative Writing as opposed to ‘straight English’. At more than 50 you can do a PhD in it.
The rise of Creative Writing has profoundly shaped British literary culture (even those writers who have not taken the subject will make a point of telling you that) and yet this rise was never easy. As Bradbury quipped in a valedictory piece for the Times Literary Supplement (‘The bridgeable gap’, January 17 1992), the MA course he and Angus Wilson had established at UEA ‘was regarded as a suspect American import, like the hamburger — a vulgar hybrid which, as everyone once knew, no sensible person would ever eat.’
Part of the suspicion towards Creative Writing, both then as now, was the question of whether or not you could teach somebody to write. The major literary figures of the past — Joyce, Woolf, Eliot, Proust — had done well enough without an MA, and Hemingway had once claimed, somewhat bizarrely, that ‘writing cannot be taught, but it can be learned’. To say as much is to re-hash the Romantic idea of the solitary creative genius, an idea that would have appealed to Hemingway’s own brand of macho stoicism (even if he’d received his own fair share of advice from Gertrude Stein in the salon at 27 rue de Fleurus).
For Bradbury and Wilson, however, the question of whether or not writing could be taught was of secondary importance. The UEA MA was, for them, a cultural intervention, an attempt to shape British literary culture by creating a system of patronage for experimental writing beyond the pressures of the literary market. As Bradbury himself put it in the same TLS article: ‘a course of this kind, conducted from the distance of an academic environment, distinct from the commercial marketplace, could have some impact on the state of serious fiction in Britain at the time, by which both of us were dismayed.’
The source of Bradbury and Wilson’s dismay about the state of British fiction at the end of the 60s was the cultural dominance of an emerging group of American novelists (all of them men): Bellow, Mailer, Roth, Updike. Novels like Herzog (1964) or Portnoy’s Complaint (1969) were written with a vitality and directness which many British readers perceived to be distinctly American. (In reality, of course, this was never a very accurate idea: we need only thumb through Doris Lessing’s The Golden Notebook or Anthony Burgess’s A Clockwork Orange (both 1962) to appreciate the originality and inventiveness of contemporaneous British prose.)
But what did Bradbury mean by ‘serious fiction’? His use of the term is curious, not least because he was himself a successful comic novelist. Bradbury offered a fuller definition in a speech given more than a decade before the TLS piece, when he was Chair of Judges for the 1981 Booker Prize. (The winner was Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children, although Bradbury had, in the committee room, backed D. M. Thomas’s The White Hotel.) Tuxed-up, Bradbury called the Booker ‘a prize for serious fiction … the work of a writer who is pressing at the edge of the genre, taking it as a form of enquiry, into the grammars and orders, the means and structures, by which we build up sufficient fictions of the world.’
There is an obvious parallel here between Bradbury’s ‘pressing at the edge of the genre’ and Ezra Pound’s motto for modernism: ‘make it new’. Serious fiction, for Bradbury, was a method of discovery, a vehicle for thinking about and questioning the world we live in. This theory of the novel had preoccupied him throughout his career: his 1973 monograph Possibilities referred to novels as ‘speculative instruments’; in his 1996 foreword to Dorothea Brande’s guidebook Becoming a Writer, Bradbury called fiction ‘a medium of exploration’.
We see this intellectual and aesthetic exploration in the three stories which made up McEwan’s MA thesis. ‘Intersection’, for instance, is a propulsive tale, told – like Beckett’s How It Is (1962) or Molly Bloom’s soliloquy at the end of Ulysses (1922) – with almost no punctuation. McEwan explains in the preface that he did this to explore ‘oppression’: ‘oppression by words, lectures, class, pride, inertia, indifference, and finally, as a metaphor for these, the literal oppression by the weight of bodies.’ While ‘Intersection’ did not make the cut for McEwan’s 1975 uncomfortably macabre debut, First Love, Last Rites, it was published the same year in the little magazine TriQuarterly — albeit with full punctuation.
McEwan had told Bradbury in that first supervision at the Maids Head that he wanted to ‘try out a number of deranged first-person narrators’. The stories he produced in that first year — and which came to be collected in First Love, Last Rights and his next collection, In Between the Sheets (1978) — were really experiments in narration (the Latin root of ‘experiment’ is, after all, experiri meaning ‘to try’). McEwan would continue his experiments in narrative derangement in his first novel, The Cement Garden (1978), and he would go on to be dubbed ‘Ian Macabre’ by the magazine Private Eye.
Despite McEwan’s success, it was a truth self-evident for Bradbury and Wilson that innovative or experimental fiction would struggle within the ‘commercial marketplace’. This is not to say that publishers are only interested in middlebrow fiction, but rather to acknowledge that a publishing house is necessarily interested in what sells — and the idea of what sells depends, largely, on what has sold before. For this reason, the bigger publishing houses are less inclined to ‘make it new’ than ‘make it familiar’.
And yet a book cannot exist without its readers. Bradbury and Wilson knew this — they were, after all, both published novelists — and they understood that the market was a reality of life for the postwar British novelist. At the end of McEwan’s MA, Bradbury sent ‘Conversation with a Cupboard Man’ to the literary journal Transatlantic Review, where it was published in 1972. In later years, Bradbury and his wife Elizabeth (who adapted novels for BBC Radio 4) hosted an annual Christmas party at their home in Heigham Grove. There, in the expansive front hall, selected MA students were introduced to literary agents and publishers from London.
Since Bradbury’s retirement in 1995, the UEA MA has expanded from a single course in prose fiction to courses in poetry, scriptwriting, and non-fiction. As Creative Writing has grown, so has its amenability to the market: students can now take ‘Publishing’ as one of their modules, and an MA in Crime Writing (the most lucrative of genres, outselling both the cookbook and the so-called ‘romantasy’) was created in 2016.
The true inheritor of Bradbury and Wilson’s original cultural intervention, if there is one, is the Goldsmiths Prize, established by Tim Parnell in 2013 ‘to reward fiction that breaks the mould or extends the possibilities of the novel form’. Previous winners include Ali Smith’s How to Be Both (2014) and Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport (2019). Both novels had also been shortlisted for their respective year’s Booker, although it’s difficult to imagine a novel like Ellmann’s making the shortlist in 2014 (it is, after all, a thousand-page sentence). The fact that it did, and from there reached thousands more readers, is testament to the Goldsmiths Prize’s influence on other literary prizes, as well as its wider influence on contemporary literary culture.
Over time the annual Christmas party at the Bradburys’ developed into an established part of the course, and now two agent meetings for the MA cohorts take place in sunny June. The poets are not invited: but at least they have their garrets.
Joseph Williams is reviews editor at Critical Quarterly. He is currently reading Colin Barrett’s compulsively brilliant second collection of stories, Homesickness (2022) and Anthony Burgess’s Nothing Like the Sun (1964)