Melvyn Bragg has been a uniquely influential figure in British broadcasting and the arts for over 40 years. He holds the chancellorship of the University of Leeds and a seat in the House of Lords, numerous civic, charitable and business appointments, and a dozen honorary doctorates—and he is the author of 20 novels. In 1999 he began a series of autobiographical fictions based on his upbringing in Cumbria, the fourth (and most personal) of which appeared in April. Just what these novels mean, and what they might go on to mean, are questions that illuminate much that is both important and often ignored in English fiction today.
In The Soldier's Return, the first volume, Sam Richardson returns from war in Burma to a country and a marriage both in need of a new start. Ellen has waited five years for this, but now he's back, she's not so sure. Their six-year-old son, Joe, doesn't like this quick-tempered man who has come to share their bed. At one point a new start in Australia looks likely, but Wigton turns out to be their fate after all, and the family re-forms to fend off the winter of 1947.
By the beginning of A Son of War, the second volume, father and son have grown closer, but the invincibility of working-class fathers brings forth intimations of cowardliness in their sons. The older Joe gets, the more he is caught between his father's injunction to face the world and his mother's silent plea to stay close to her. Joe struggles to be loyal to both. At the same time, he discovers Mary, and her slow, elegant handstands against the wall.
Crossing the Lines, volume three, begins in 1955 with Joe at grammar school and in the business of moving up and away. The glint of Oxford on the horizon fills his ambition. Joe doesn't see it that way, of course. He sees his as a local life dedicated to Jesus Christ and Rachel Wardlow but, gradually, the history boy begins to take over. If he wins a scholarship, he will have to leave the people who loved and sustained him. If he fails, he will be "have to bear it like the mark of Cain." Success will never take him as he is. He has to build a new self up, and face his old self down. The strain begins to tell, and, "in secret and alone," Joe has to deal with spasms of mental illness.
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It's fair to say that these three novels have their problems. The prose can be toneless, and the war against cliché is not always fought. Doors are thrown open, arms reach out, Japs are cruel. Plain sentences are, it's true, a virtue (Kingsley Amis criticised Martin for his inability to write them), but plain is not the same as flat. As for the story, Bragg has been over this ground before. His first novel, For Want of a Nail (1965), followed Tom, who was not unlike Joe, and another Cumbrian trilogy—The Hired Man (1969), A Place in England (1970) and Kingdom Come (1980)—followed another working-class family, the Talentires. In an emotional sense, Wigton has always been at one end of Bragg's writing and Oxford at the other.
For stories grounded in working people, there's not enough about the work they do. We are offered instead a vague sociology of alienation. Bragg has always struggled, also, with the way Cumbrians speak. In the dialect, how much more tanned and cross-grained Sam would seem? How much more slim and aspirational his wife? How much more divided (in his syllables) their son? Orwell said that the English were branded on the tongue, but not Bragg's English. These people deserve a harder, bonier, more wheedling voice than he can give them.
I am not supposing that it is easy to find that voice. Jack Common vowed he would never write phonetically, but avoided the problem by telling most of Kiddar's Luck (1951) in the first person. This, by the way, is the great Tyneside novel. Gordon Burn, who has taken regional writing into open country with The North of England Home Service (2003), carries less dialogue than Bragg but, like Common, finds his sound more through figures of speech and intonation than words on the page. As for the Glasgow boys and their couldn't-give-a-fuck phonetics, Bragg has expressed his admiration but chosen not to take their path. It's a real dilemma. (Funnily enough, George MacDonald Fraser, who was in the Border Regiment, 14th army of Burma, gets away with it in his autobiographical Quartered Safe Out Here: " 'ey, 'aud on a minnit, son! Ah knaw yoo… is thoo f'ae Carel?" Welcome to Carlisle.)
Dialect is important because authenticity, or the promise of it, is central to the narrative realism Bragg so trusts and admires. On the one hand, Bragg's is a highly controlled form of writing. On the other hand, it puts more faith in ordinary lives and feelings, and takes them more seriously, than any other art form. You feel you know the characters as well or even better than they know themselves. Narrative realism makes the same assumptions about what happens in life as historical writing makes about what did happen: about what it is possible to know, and the need to give it structure. If there's a whiff of the archive about Bragg's novels, it suits the historian in him.
But what if we cannot know real life? And what if we can never bring it to order because it doesn't go anywhere? It just pulses till it stops. In this sense, narrative realism is impossible, because it can never be realistic enough. At some point, it must give way to the dark incongruity of human existence. People often don't know why things happen and, if they did, couldn't describe it. Realist writers, therefore, are sometimes charged with describing the indescribable—and, in so doing, they run the risk of going beyond what their subjects can know. Put in this situation, DH Lawrence said that writers should "tremble," in that "quick moment of time," when the world teeters on the edge of their power to show it.
In recent times, it has been the literary fashion to see realist novels like Bragg's as inferior or old-fashioned, because, like history, they make too many assumptions about what can be known. But the quality of writing has got little to do with the form a writer adopts. No form can hold down what a novel can do because once inside its walls, its borders are open. Realism and non-realism can both support and subvert each other, or act as what TS Eliot called "objective correlatives," according to what the writer is trying to do. At root, however, the committed realist will work within the world and its historic limits, which include its imaginative limits, and seek to bring his story home.
This is Bragg. Some of his subjects are more successfully rendered than others, but none are crushed. Just because Sam and Ellen say very little does not mean they feel very little, though Bragg doesn't overelaborate. We feel we know them nevertheless, and without being told we do. Similarly, just because the culture is tight-lipped does not mean its people are. And we learn this without being told it. As for Joe, he cannot let go of a life that seems spinning away. He is a history boy after all, and must stay in control. He works hard, trusts the system, gets what he wants, even starts building his own narrative. At the same time, so much in his life remains not nailed down and we are shown that going hammer in hand might not be the way to nail it.
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Certainly, Bragg's reputation among many critics has never equalled those of Booker-winning contemporaries like McEwan, Rushdie or Swift (Adam Mars-Jones's 2003 review of Crossing the Lines for the Observer was headlined "Don't give up the day job"). But in spite of his publisher's tendency to blockbuster packaging, Bragg's books are not written to formula. On the contrary, they are original works that happen to be read by millions. Their author is a far bigger writer than his celebrity suggests. Second, the Englishness these novels speak of is fast eroding. Another few years and it will be gone forever, as will those capable of remembering it. Third, Bragg is at his best on the things that professional historians don't do well. He can take the long and the short view, and he can write of feelings as well as events. Bragg is a "condition of England" writer. He can't help himself. Everything, somehow, he brings to judgement.
Take Sam Richardson. Sam is no simple hero. He was a brave soldier and a good publican, but you are shown how in other company, according to other lights, he might appear a lesser figure. He plays bookies' runner, but cannot put his hand on 50 quid. He reads everything he can, but you wouldn't know it, not from what he says, which rarely matches what he feels. As for Ellen, her passions send her looking for other heroes, not least her son. All this can sound like the Morels in DH Lawrence's autobiographical fiction Sons and Lovers. Paul Morel was the first scholarship boy of English letters—struggling to succeed in one culture while living in another—and it is his mother Gertrude who nurtures his talent, keeping him out of the pit. Paul's father has his own views. Same as Sam, he likes to scamper across the fields. Bragg has not been the only young lad to learn from this story, though whether Lawrence ever helped anyone find their own voice is another question.
Around the family, Bragg casts the knowable community. "Speed," king of the lanes, is a legend in his own wellies. This is the kid who crouches under a thundering train and stands up to claim the day. This is the boy who marries Lizzie, the girl who breaks in stallions for a tinker. Bragg keeps characters such as these short and sweet and working hard. Dickens would have found them parts. Others are less convincing and arrive straight out of Gaumont-British: Mr Drummond Gould, he of the "scimitar smile," capitalist villain, tall like his chimneys; or Colin, Ellen's half-brother, the man with the weak chest to go with the weak character. I didn't believe a word of Colin until, funnily enough, I remembered him once sitting astride a Tiger Cub motorcycle, smoking tabs and telling tales all the way down to the butt.
Bragg's most successful character is Wigton itself. Lads hang out like crows. Girls show a leg and stare back. The town gathers everybody in, while all around there are patches of waste, rushing becks, far distant hills. Following George Eliot's advice for a life to be "rooted in some spot of native land where it may get the love of tender kinship," Joe inherits a landscape that holds the power of generation upon generation. Central to this is the elusive world (to men, that is) of female friendship: the hand laid quietly on the wrist, the linking arm, girls on the gad. Bragg especially associates the coming of the welfare state with the hopes of young women. In 1948, the Richardsons move into a new council house with a bathroom. At last, Ellen feels, history is on her side.
In education too, the state is more willing to let the people in. Not all. Only those who show themselves worthy, as Joe shows himself worthy. The grammar school is able to teach because it still believes in its own superiority. While Sam and Ellen just have their fancies for books and music, Joe learns English literature and ballroom dancing. A friend asks of the pub's sing-song room: "You mean people just come in and sing?" Strange, the potency of cheap music.
Wigton will never leave Joe. Everything in him comes from this squat northern town. Bragg is writing about settlement, and the authority it used to devolve on what used to be called the British people. Now that that settlement has been broken by global markets, government policies and mass immigration, Bragg comes to one of the most important issues of our day, whose consequences rumble on. Joe runs all day through streets he knows and streets he believes he and his family possess. It hardly seems credible.
Much else has changed since The Soldier's Return. Bragg came of age just after the old Britain peaked—maximum manufacturing, first welfare state, victory over fascism—and before the new Britain went into overdrive with more private wealth and opportunity, though less cohesion. Like many of his generation and background, Bragg has done well out of both the old Britain and the new; in his case, exceptionally well—from spitty boy to key figure in arts and broadcasting to Lord Barg of Ubiquity (as Private Eye would have it). Everyone reading this will know about the man the newspapers call "Melvyn the Magnificent." He really does need no introduction; still less any plaudits from me. But he keeps harking back.
Crossing the Lines ends in Oxford around 1958. After the going up, the going down and the final break with the girl from home, a new Joe is born in Wadham College. Time has passed so quickly since that morning when the soldier returned "alight with love," and grabbed him and threw him high. Joe leaves the trilogy as he joined it. In the air.
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In Remember Me, published this April, it was clear that Bragg was going to have to come down to earth and face the fact of his fame. Writing the life of a provincial schoolboy is one thing; writing the life of a gold-embossed public figure is another. The press is far more interested in the public figure than the novelist and so, as we approached the life of Melvyn Bragg through the life of Joe, his thinly concealed cover, you didn't have to be a weatherman to know that the inferences would gather like a storm on Bassenthwaite lake; that what happened to Joe, and what Joe thinks, happened to Bragg, and is what Bragg thinks. Moreover, if Bragg was about to use volume four to leave the boy behind, and take us into the burgeoning world of 1960s television, and stick to his realist guns and tell it like it was, then the whole project was going to get a lot more trying.
Annals of the poor are always with us. It's annals of the rich that we lack, for privacy is part of their power. Was Bragg going to tell the private history of a new and powerful class? He was well positioned to do so. Or would his honours get caught in his letters and make it impossible? There was every chance that volume four would falter and crash at the beginning of his fame, and that for once Melvyn would not be able to cross the lines. In the event, none of this happens. Remember Me is a love story. Bragg sticks with the realism, but sidesteps the money and politics.
It is 1961 and Joe meets Natasha at a party. She is a mysterious French art student in a black dressing gown and Joe lays siege to her north Oxford bedsit. What else could he do? They marry quickly, but don't confide past illnesses. There isn't the time and, anyway, they love each other. Thirty chapters later, in a pink restaurant in Kew, we find them trying to keep it that way. "Joseph," as he is now called, is enjoying a career in film and television but is heading towards a mental breakdown so severe that he will hardly be able to breathe. He wants to be in love, but not only with his wife. Blurred by drink, he still thinks love can conquer all. Across the table is a woman who has ceased to trust him, though she has not ceased to love him. They leave, apparently together but actually apart. They have everything, including a beautiful sunny child and all London has to offer.
By the end, fear and madness have broken in. Both Joe and Natasha are in analysis; neither knows how it came to this, or how to get out. Joe has made a lot of new friends at the BBC. He is not the man he thought he was. As for Natasha, or what's left of her, she too is unwell, edging from the light. Now they have separated, her idealism has degenerated into obsession. She trusted him before she loved him. What now, when the trust has gone? On that last morning, finally there is nothing left for her to love or link with.
Remember Me is a passionate and principled novel that rages against the dying of the marriage made by Lisa Roche and Melvyn Bragg in 1961. He was 21, she was 26. They had a child, Marie-Elsa, in 1968. Lisa took her own life in 1971. From the novel it's difficult to tell how much is real and how much is realism, but from what Bragg has said, it's as true as he could make it. The novel takes the form of letters from Joe to his daughter. This device is used too intermittently and the novel is overwritten, but these criticisms hardly matter. What matters is that the story is driven forward with such inner conviction that any outside criticism seems like a betrayal. Against this, the problem of Bragg's fame is no problem. The rich and famous, or soon to be, populate the novel's fringes—but I didn't give a damn who they were, or what they thought.
It's a defining feature of Bragg's work that he never makes the best the enemy of the good. This novel is more ambitious than all the rest, but he sticks to his themes. He's still rooted in ordinary time and place, but it's Kew and Hampstead, not Wigton, and while the idea of Oxford remains attractive, Joe is a Londoner now—hero of a thousand dinner parties. Still attentive to how class works, Bragg turns his attention to the rising British broadcasting class. The English working class hardly figure in Joseph's new world at all, except as cleaners, waiters or subjects. Above all, Bragg continues to believe in his story.
Now that it's told, the question remains. What next? What if, in volume five, Bragg takes his democratic art into undemocratic places? What if, in volume six, this high-minded man moves into what John Gray has called the high-minded venality of our times? Certainly, nobody else seems likely to try their hand at an English saga. Of those who could—not McEwan, not Barnes, not Drabble, not Amis, not Burn, not Smith, not Rushdie, not Kureishi, and certainly not Lessing or Naipaul. All of them, I think, would see it as a boring edifice to climb. All of them have shown interest in Englishness and history, but not consistently. It might be that narrative realism requires a level of cultural cohesion greater than contemporary England can offer, and it has seemed more fitting to try more ironic, more miniature or more allegorical forms. Or it might be postmodernism's hubristic belief that it has dealt a mortal blow to history, liberalism and realism—which all share similar assumptions about what can be known and said. Or it might be the intellectuals' old contempt for the masses. All the same, and for these very reasons, it seems a pity that saga is no longer regarded as a viable way to contribute to contemporary literature when no one could doubt its contribution to contemporary cinema and television. As we professors say, the novels of Melvyn Bragg are contesting prevailing assumptions about the form. He writes seriously for a mass readership; he is still crossing lines; he is still exploring ways of bringing things together; history boy to the end, he still believes in the people.
