This review contains spoilers!
History Man‘s plot consists of roughly three strands, the first of which is far more important that the other two.
Strand 1: “If you want to have something that’s genuinely unstructured, you have to plan it carefully.” The novel opens with Howard and Barbara Kirk, “true citizens of the present,” discussing a party they want to throw for their friends and colleagues at the University of Watermouth in the south of England. “The university, having aspirations to relevance, has made much of sociology,” Howard’s field. While Barbara is frustrated at having sacrificed her academic career for her family (husband, son, daughter), Howard is doing well in his. “His heart bleeds for victims. And he finds them all over. The only ones he can’t see are the people he victimizes himself.”
Their initial discussion of whom to invite to the party that will kick off the semester leads to an exploration of the Kirks’ marital relations, including their various affairs (mostly his). Howard is the titular History Man, not at all a man of the past, rather a very up-to-the-minute user of the latest jargon. For example, marriage in his definition “is society’s technique for permanentizing the inherent contingency of relationships.” Howard swims with the current of history, always managing to catch the coming wave before anyone else.
One of these waves involves his and Barbara’s open marriage arrangement. To one of his numerous partners, a bountiful social psychologist named Flora Beniform, Howard confides: “Yes, we stay together, but we distrust one another.” To which she replies: “Isn’t that a definition of marriage?” Flora later calls marriage “the most advanced form of warfare in the modern world.”
The party planned at the beginning forms the book’s centerpiece. Making fun of faculty chit-chat at such an occasion is easy – all one has to do is quote snippets out of context. Bradbury makes full use of this, to delicious effect.
Strand 2: Howard and his students. Those who imitate, adulate or sleep with their professor receive encouragement and good grades. This arrangement excludes George Carmody, the only conservative among them. Howard gives him low marks, partly because of his politics. The chairman of Howard’s department offers some resistance, as he is reluctant to give any student a failing grade: “We require a very high standard of nothingness for that.”
Ultimately, though, Carmody proves not just a social misfit but a mediocre student. He has no more the makings of a hero than his would-be revolutionary classmates. The professor emerges victorious from their confrontation because he retains the support of the radical students – and of Miss Callendar, his colleague from the English Dept.
She, among the younger generation, is the character who at first seems to embody healthy skepticism combined with common sense. Alas, her freshness and independence prove to be more the reflection of innocence than steadfast principle; eventually – and disappointingly – she too falls under the Howard’s sway. Most readers will wish that she had kept her distance, then stood up to him and put him in his place. As David Lodge has observed, “No single element in The History Man provoked more discussion and disagreement among its readers than Annie Callendar’s capitulation to Howard Kirk. Feminists and traditional moralists were equally disappointed or outraged by it. Couples quarrelled about it. What gave offence to many was that a character who is presented as satisfying his own ego under guise of supporting a collective revolution does not get his comeuppance, as the development of the plot seems to promise, but is allowed to escape punishment and even to triumph at the end of the story.” (The Guardian, Jan. 12, 2008)
Strand 3 involves the invitation to Prof. Mangel to speak on campus. Mangel is a geneticist whose politically awkward but data-based conclusions lead campus progressives to accuse him of racism. Without leaving many fingerprints, Howard instigates his invitation by manipulating the discussion at a departmental meeting. His calculation is that the announcement of such a controversial guest speaker will cause an uproar, something he delights in as it will energize his faction. Ultimately, though, the scheme is somewhat blunted when the unfortunate Mangel dies shortly before the day of his lecture. Nonetheless, the novel ends much as it began, with the Kirks hosting an end-of-semester party at their home, though this time the affair is rather smaller and more subdued, with burned-out wife Barbara engaging in self-destructive behavior. Proving once again the adage: “Everyone’s life looks more successful from the outside.”
Malcolm Bradbury writes like a tongue-in-cheek curmudgeon who disapproves of all the modern inconveniences without sentimentalizing the good old days. The author’s sympathies lie mostly with Henry Beamish, Howard’s colleague who was still witty “in the old days before the anguishes of 1968.” Now his marriage is ending, which leads to a failed suicide attempt. On the whole, Beamish is the opposite of Howard, as he does his best to withdraw from the ongoing outrages of the day. In fact, the novel is dedicated to this fictional character.
Bradbury takes a sour but also wicked delight in skewering academic pretense, especially when it comes to the with-it crowd who always strive to be ahead of the game. A high point comes in Chapter IX, with its minute depiction of exactly how departmental meetings are run. “It has often been remarked … that those in History are distinguished by their high rate of absenteeism, those in English by the amount of wine consumed afterwards, and those in Sociology by their contentiousness.” This one comes complete with quibbles about proper language. Bradbury here inserts an early instance of what would later become known as PC speech. A visiting American professor complains: “May I point out, Mr Chairperson, that of the persons in this room you are addressing as ‘gentlemen’, seven are women? […] May I suggest the formulation ‘Can we come to order, persons?’ “
© Hamilton Beck
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