Who was Howard Kirk?

Malcolm Bradbury’s university novel The History Man was published in 1975, and ever since literary academics have been wondering who the main character, Howard Kirk, was based on.

On January 12, Guardian Review published, for no apparent reason, a page of praise for the novel by Bradbury’s good friend David Lodge – who also writes university English department comedies, and is quick to tell us that his Changing Places also appeared in 1975.

Kirk is interesting because he is sexually rapacious and politically significant.

As Lodge puts it: “We see Kirk presiding over his party like a Lord of Misrule, beginning his exploitative affair with Felicity Phee while continuing to sleep with his colleague Flora Beniform and endeavouring to bed Miss Callendar, plotting a totally factitious protest movement on campus and discriminating outrageously against a student of conservative views”.

Lodge is careful to repeat that the novel is set at the University of Watermouth, in a fictitious town on the south coast of England – so Sussex might be meant. But Bradbury was writing about his own university, the University of East Anglia, where he worked from 1966 until his retirement in 1995. He was knighted in 2000, the year of his death, though he has now no reputation as a critic – only The History Man survives.

Howard Kirk was based on three academics at UEA. One was Jonathan Raban, now a travel writer and novelist. Another was an academic nonentity called Pete Mercer, whose Lothario-like activities come as a surprise to anybody who ever met him. And the third was Howard Temperley, a historian of America who had the misfortune to work with Bradbury – whose specialism was American literature.

The great talking point is the way in which feminist academic Annie Callendar falls dramatically for Raban – sorry, Howard Kirk – for how can she do that? As Lodge puts it, Kirk “tracks her down in her old-fashioned flat, and seduces her in her old-fashioned bed”. This caused debate: “Feminists and traditional moralists were equally disappointed or outraged by it….Couples quarrelled about it”.

As everybody at UEA would have known, Annie Callender was based on English professor and feminist Lorna Sage.

She is best remembered for her autobiographical Bad Blood (2000), the story of an agonised childhood and adolescence. She wrote feminist book reviews for the Observer for many years, and for LRB and TLS. A lifelong smoker, she died of emphysema in 2001.

In the novel, the seduction takes place after a party at the Mangolds, who were Bradbury himself and his wife Elizabeth. Kirk’s other main sexual victim is Felicity Phee, in real life a put-upon art history MA, who was known to Bradbury (unnamed here because never famous).

An unhappily-married character called Beamish was based on the well-known Professor of Linguistics, Roger Fowler.

Bradbury’s satire is directed cruelly against women. Kirk, repulsive as he is, is allowed to get away with his sexual and political campaigns. The women are uniformly defeated.
If you know the real story – and there is more – Bradbury comes out of it all as a writer willing to exploit vulnerable women, and to satirise feminists by imagining their humiliating seduction.

Politically, The History Man was a disaster for the reputation of universities. The novel didn’t make much impact in 1975, but when it was adapted as a television series in 1981, it gave support to the prejudices of the Conservative government (elected in 1979), one that Thatcher’s ministers were only too willing to exploit.

Kirk persecutes a conservative-minded student in a way that no left-academic was ever known to do. Bradbury never got the point. It was impossible to explain to him that there might be something wrong about his characterisation of the political left in the early 1970s. Despite the genial, put-upon, almost bumbling and inoffensive persona that he tried to project as “himself” in the novel, and in the late-night-talking, pipe-smoking, party-giving professor of real life, he was politically paranoid about the changes of the 1960s.

He saw the liberalism that he practised under threat. It pushed him to the right politically, but he believed he was still defending liberal values.

He wasn’t. He was a Trojan horse for the political right, and the universities have not recovered yet from the consequences of the policies that he helped Thatcherism to impose.