Doctor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury Read Free Book Online Page A

so it went on, day after day for a week or two or three. There was myself, there was Ros, and there was the paper figure of Doctor Criminale.
    Now if you read at all – and of course you must do, or you wouldn’t be here with me in the first place – you too have probably heard of Criminale. For if you read, he writes;
oh, how he writes, or has written. In fact ‘writing’ seems far too small a word to describe the output of forty years that has spurted from his pen, too petty by far to define the
prodigious mental energy, the overwhelming intellectual ambition, that had kept him in endless creation, far too simple a term to denote the output of works that stand stacked in the bookstores
from Beijing to Berkeley, to the point where he must surely soon be due his own Dewey Decimal classification. Nothing reduced his output. No matter how far he travelled, how often he lectured, how
many congresses he attended, he wrote, and was never silenced. Stories tell us that since he was seventeen he usually produced a poem a day, and probably a journalistic article too. And since then,
just as he had seemed to visit every country, so he appeared to have visited every literary form: the novel and the philosophical treatise, the play and the travel essay, the epic poem and the
economic tract. And if this were not enough, his photographic studies of the late modern nude are acknowledged everywhere (see the recent exhibition in Dresden, with Susan Sontag writing the
exhibition catalogue). We are talking here about an all-round man.
    So the theatre-goers among you will doubtless know his great historical drama
The Women Behind Martin Luther
, which is generally compared with Brecht, and not generally to Brecht’s
advantage. And what serious reader hasn’t read, and probably wept a tear or two over,
Homeless: A Tale of the Modern Age
, that small but perfect novella that Graham Greene once named
as the finest single work of the second half of the twentieth century? Biography-buffs will know his great three-volume life of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe (
Goethe: The German Shakespeare
?),
which not only restores to us the indivisible wholeness of the man but proves beyond doubt that the German Reich could never have existed for a minute without him. Others will remember his
extraordinary work of economic theory,
Is Money Necessary
?, which had so much impact in Soviet Russia, and his summative study
The Psycho-Pathology of the Postmodern Masses
, favourite
reading of social psychologists and police chiefs everywhere. Add to that those vast illustrated tomes on Graeco-Roman civilization so weighty they must have cracked in two the Manhattan coffee
tables they were doubtless intended for, and the small paperback works on Marxist philosophy whose tattered covers once filled the bookstore windows in Leningrad and Moscow and were awarded as
swimming prizes at Communist summer schools worldwide, and you already have a polymath. Criminale didn’t simply write in every literary form; he seemed to appeal to every political
culture.
    All this I expect you know very well. But, believe me, this is only the beginning of the man called Bazlo Criminale. Oh, you may have sat in the stalls and enjoyed the epic spectacle of
The
Women Behind Luther
, or wept on your couch or your poolside recliner over the sweet perfection of
Homeless
. But have you read – and when I say read, I mean
really
read
– his remarkable critique of phenomenology? His startling and courageous refutation of Marx’s techno-centrism? His audacious challenge to Nietzsche on modernity? His classic dispute
with Adorno about the interpretation of history? The bitter quarrel with Heidegger over irony (which Criminale had much more of, and won)? You haven’t? Well, I have. For Criminale was not
simply a writer. Unlike most writers, he thought as well.
    In fact he had simply to catch sight of a German philosopher and he was in there after the jugular, only to glimpse a