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His endlessly grim analysis of friendship gets the professor into all sorts of tangles: he admits that ‘by all accounts Nabokov and Wilson’s exchanges were amicable, but one suspects this was as much a performance as a reflection of sincere affection’. Bradford ascribes some fiendish characteristics to Wordsworth too, arguing that he cynically exploited Coleridge’s fragile state of mind to turn him into a thankless assistant. It means he then has to explain away their decision to go travelling together. Many of the relationships he describes did have moments of tension, but Bradford never sees the roses for the thorns.
The struggle against the evidence may have led him to some rather clumsy writing. He doesn’t mind stating the obvious — ‘Nabokov’s inverted commas are obviously designed to remind Wilson that he is quoting him verbatim’ — but he prefers bamboozling sentences like this: ‘To pinpoint Mailer’s equivalent on this side of the Atlantic we need to look back almost two generations and stifle an impudent snigger.’
Now, for most people, stifling an impudent snigger is quite a rare sensation. If you’re going to tell readers that’s what they’re doing, you need to make absolutely sure they are. Unfortunately, it’s never quite clear why a comparison between the drunken escapades of Norman Mailer and Dylan Thomas brings it on for Bradford, or indeed why he goes to such lengths to find a British equivalent for Mailer in the first place.
In spite of being weirdly nasty about A.N. Wilson, accusing him of believing he has access to his subjects’ state of mind, Bradford goes in for a lot of that kind of thing himself. Discussing Kingsley Amis’s novel The Green Man, he writes:
Throughout, there are parallels between Allington’s life and that of his creator, but, instead of obligating [sic] his fictional avatar to face up to questions of who he was and what he had done, Amis shifts the focus to Allington’s battle against an agent of Satan….. Was this a case of Amis allowing his worst features to pervade the novel, but then stopping short of confronting them? Or was he, with disarming frankness, comparing his own lack of control with things that defy understanding and credibility?
Perhaps. Or was it just a good joke? For Bradford there’s always more to it, and it’s usually sinister; Amis’s ‘plots offered him hiding places, endless substitutes for candour’; Philip Roth is ‘the most celebrated practitioner of art-as-avoidance’. It’s odd for a man who’s read so much Kingsley Amis to so seriously miss the point: novels are not therapy, thank goodness; otherwise they wouldn’t be funny.
There are glimpses of interest; it’s good to know, for example, that as a child Henry Fielding wrote a letter to his grandmother describing his brother as a ‘shitten brat’, and that Dickens lingered over Thackeray’s grave ‘watching with haggardly eyes every spadeful of dust that was thrown upon it’. Literary Rivals is frustrating because Bradford has done his homework; he quotes some fascinating exchanges, and if he could just have taken off his horrid monocle, he might have seen the humanity as well as the sniping in the books and letters of his heroes.
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Because you read about a.n. wilson
Also by Molly Guinness
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