Can universities create writers? The novelist Glenn Patterson recalls his 20-year experience of creative-writing courses, starting with Malcolm Bradbury's, the first of its kind
Towards the end of 1981 I was working in a book shop in Belfast. An old schoolfriend, back from university in England, called in one day, looking for a Picador paperback. This wasn't a surprise. Everyone who went, or had ever thought of going, to university in 1981 was looking for Picadors. They were the antithesis of pocket sized, the print equivalent of a 12-inch single.
You not only read Picador books: you could be sure to be seen to be reading Picador books. I knew the book my friend was looking for, but I didn't know the story he told me about its author. Apparently, this guy went to university and did absolutely nothing: lecturers never even saw him. At the end of his third year he was called to give an account of himself. Where had he been all this time? For answer he threw a manuscript on the table. His stories. His lecturers were so impressed by them they gave him a first, and the stories were instantly published. The book was First Love, Last Rites, the author Ian McEwan and the story my friend told me the first, garbled account I had heard of the MA in creative writing at the University of East Anglia, run by Malcolm Bradbury.
I was getting a bit fed up in my book shop in Belfast. I thought I could do nothing for three years as well as anyone else. I, who had at that stage written a handful of poems and a single story, thought the very least I would produce in that time was a collection of short stories. I filled out the standard university entrance application. I put East Anglia down as my number-one choice; actually, my only choice. Fortunately (back then I would have said naturally), I was accepted. Unfortunately, I still had only the haziest notion of the difference between a BA and an MA.
The following October I found myself being inducted for "prelims" in the university's school of English and American studies. I remember a lecture on Dickens, delivered by a lecturer lying on a table because of backache. I remember a session where we paired off and guided our blindfolded partners around the room, using cries and whistles and clicks. I remember the only things I wrote for the first three weeks were daily (and sometimes twice- and thrice-daily) letters home to my girlfriend.
And then, at Easter in my first year, I learned that Bradbury had decided to offer an undergraduate writing course the following autumn. Even more surprisingly, I wrote, from nowhere, a decent story. Bolstered by this, I put my name down. Mine was the first story presented in that class. Bradbury liked it and the other story I wrote, later in the term. It was the beginning of an association that was to last nearly 20 years.
I was eventually accepted for the MA in autumn 1985. The course was then 15 years old. Bradbury had set it up with his colleague Angus Wilson, who, like him, had experience of creative-writing courses in the US. In 1985 Kazuo Ishiguro was a recent graduate. Within four years he would win the Booker Prize and interest in the course - and applications to it - would rise sharply.
I've no idea how many applications there were for the six places the year I did the course. Several students were paying their own way, taking breaks from careers in business or journalism. Another, Timothy Wilson, had been an undergraduate with me. He had sold his first novel, The Master Of Morholm, while in his final year. I was getting a grant from Belfast Education and Library Board, which in practical terms was at least as important as the course itself. For a full year all I had to worry about was writing. That and my health. At least half our group smoked. Bradbury was a famous pipe smoker. Between emptying it, packing it, lighting and relighting it, he rarely had the pipe out of his hand unless it was to accept the odd gifted fag. When my own work was being discussed I more or less chain smoked.
The format of the course was simple. Each Thursday two students would hand in a story, or a chapter from a novel in progress, to be photocopied for the rest of the group. The following Wednesday, at 2 p.m., we would meet and, for the next three hours, talk about the submitted work. That's all we did: talk. I say that's all because even then there were murmurs in the literary pages of a creative-writing-school style, as though we were being taught to write in a particular way, as though we were being formally taught anything. But it was the fact of being talked to by Bradbury as writers that was the big breakthrough for most of us.
On the first day he told us that 95 per cent of what we would hear said about our work would be of no use to us. The trick was being able to identify the 5 per cent that mattered. He meant that, try as we might to be objective critics, our observations would be coloured by personal taste. And then, too, part of the reason for taking the course was to find out, sometimes in the very act of speaking, what we thought about writing. (Developing a personal aesthetic, we said.) We were bound to come out with some stupid things.
I acquired a writing routine. My girlfriend and I were living with three other recent graduates close to Norwich train station. Given our location, we tended to have a lot of casual visitors. If we were lucky they might even be people we knew. It was less a house, more an open-ended party. I had a box room to work in. I had an office-cast-off electric typewriter to work on. The carriage return was so heavy that every time I started a new paragraph I had to wedge my legs against the desk legs to keep it from collapsing.
I wrote two more short stories in my first term, one of which I resubmitted in revised form. They were OK, but I felt a little as though I was coasting. Then, over the Christmas holiday, I started work on a novel, featuring a teenage boy who appeared to live on a rubbish dump. Since Angus Wilson's retirement, Bradbury had shared the teaching of the course with Angela Carter, who had a formidable reputation as a writer and a critic. The Bloody Chamber, her reworking of classic fairy tales, had recently been made into a film by Neil Jordan. Her book reviews in the Guardian were witty, intelligent and combative. We were all a bit scared of her. And I was first in line to hand in work to her when classes resumed after Christmas.
The first chapter did not go down particularly well with the group. (I wasn't sure about it myself.) One person wanted to know did the teenage boy really live on a dump. Carter gave what I was to learn was a characteristic laugh cum exasperated sigh. But when the reader opens a book, she said, as though it were self- evident, he enters a contract with the writer. The writer's only obligation is to be true to the rules of the world he has created. Did I say we weren't taught anything on the MA? I was wrong. Every time I sit down to start a book I remember Carter saying this. Like all truths it was self-evident the moment it was spoken. It was the encouragement I needed to carry on with the novel.
I presented two more chapters before classes ended. Throughout the summer Carter travelled up from London once a fortnight to discuss our dissertations, one to one. Afterwards we would sometimes share a taxi into town. More than once she gave the impression that she had doubts about the MA, the increasing emphasis, as she believed, on turning out writers who would be published as soon as possible after graduating. What strikes me looking back, though, is how far away the publishing world felt then, even with Tim Wilson's book making its slow journey towards publication. No swarms of agents were waiting to pick us up, or off.
When the course ended I had my 15,000-word dissertation and another 20,000 words besides. Carter told me that if the rest of the novel was as good as what she had already seen she would recommend it to her publisher, Chatto & Windus. It was hardly unqualified support, but it was something to hang on to in the midst of much change. Our landlady had decided to sell up; my girlfriend was moving to London; most of my fellow MA students left Norwich. Once or twice, calling at the university, I bumped into the new year's intake of creative writers. They were friendly, even inviting me to parties, but, unsurprisingly, I wasn't one of their group. I worried that I hadn't written enough while on the course, that I had somehow missed my chance. Worse, my grant had run out. I took a couple of part-time jobs, one in a book shop, to earn some money and leave myself time to write. I didn't write.
That Christmas I had a phone call from Bradbury. He was having a party for the MA students. As I was still around would I like to come along? In future the parties would become famous, but the only publishing person that Christmas was Mike Shaw, Bradbury's agent and close friend.
I was recovering from a virus and had just discovered it was OK to drink while taking the antibiotics I had been swallowing soberly for the previous week. I drank more than I should have, which is to say about what I normally drank in such situations. I was the last person to leave. Shaw, who was staying at Bradbury's that night, listened politely while I gabbled about the novel I was writing and invited me to send it to him if I ever finished it. When eventually I woke the next day I resolved, one, not to drink like such a maniac in future and, two, to finish the damned book.
I took the completed manuscript to Shaw's office the following April. I knew little about publishing, but like everyone else I had heard about slush piles. That morning I retyped the title page (the working title was Dog Bag) and called the book Burning Your Own. A week later Shaw rang. He wanted to represent me. I rang Carter. Within days I was talking to Chatto & Windus. They were keen. I was invited to London to meet the Chatto editorial team, including the poetry editor, Andrew Motion. They had all typed up their comments. Whether or not I chose to take them on board, they said, they were publishing my book. I stuffed the comments in my pocket and went out and drank like a maniac.
Carter stopped teaching on the MA course shortly after Burning Your Own was published, though she continued to support me and other former students, such as Anne Enright, from the year after me, whose work she had been fond of. Once she interviewed me on stage at the Institute of Contemporary Arts, in London, where, as she must have predicted, the audience consisted of people who would turn up to hear Carter read her shopping list. On another occasion, after a party my first paperback publishers threw in Covent Garden in autumn 1989, I phoned her at midnight, drunk and maudlin. I'm not a writer, I moaned. I hate the publishing industry. She told me to get a taxi to her house. (This was a woman with a young son who rose each morning at the normal young-son time.) The next day she took me to the announcement of the Guardian fiction prize. She introduced me to publishers such as Margaret Busby, Marion Boyars and John Calder. These were people, she said, who cared about literature, and I wasn't to forget that they existed too.
Carter died of cancer a few weeks before the publication of my second novel, Fat Lad, in 1992. Later that year I returned to UEA as a fellow in creative writing. The MA group had grown to a dozen. Curtis Brown had just set up a scholarship for the best applicant. It was now possible to do a creative-writing PhD. As the creative-writing programme had grown so had the volume of the sniping at Bradbury, as though the MA was being run for his glory. Bradbury was approaching 60. As well as a novelist and critic, he was a prolific television writer, whose credits included Porterhouse Blue, Cold Comfort Farm and Inspector Morse. The obvious comeback to the suggestion that he was teaching creative writing for self-promotion was to ask why he would bother. I was talking to him one day about the Irish novelist Deirdre Madden. Bradbury ducked into his room and reappeared a few moments later with a bound dissertation. It was Madden's. I asked how he had her work to hand, nearly a decade after she took his course. "It's all in there," he said, and he showed me the shelves where he kept every piece of work submitted to him for assessment.
The Christmas party seemed much more organised, with more agents and editors in attendance. I knew from chatting to them that some of the students were treating this rather than the course as their big chance to impress. And who could blame them? As befitted my new position of responsibility, I got drunk rather more slowly than normally, not that anyone was in much of a state to appreciate my restraint by the night's end. I went on from Bradbury's to a party at one of the student's houses. They swapped stories about who they had talked to. All thought the night a great success. Only two of that year's group, to the best of my knowledge, have been published, which ought to explode the myth that such social contacts invariably lead to six-figure multibook advances. Then again, it takes only the emergence of a writer such as Toby Litt every few years to keep the myths about the course alive.
Bradbury retired from teaching in 1995, the year Litt graduated, 25 years after McEwan did. He was succeeded as professor of creative writing by the poet, novelist, biographer and former Chatto & Windus poetry editor Andrew Motion.
I was by then teaching an undergraduate creative-writing course of my own, at Queen's University Belfast. When, a few years later, Queen's established an MA and was looking for an external examiner it seemed natural to turn to UEA and Motion. The launch was scheduled for November 2000. Motion had agreed to speak at it. Two days before he was due in Belfast I woke to the news that Bradbury had died, aged 68, of complications arising from lifelong respiratory problems. We phoned Motion and said we would understand if he cancelled, but Bradbury's funeral was not for several days, and he decided to come as planned. And so the launch of our MA in Belfast became a celebration too of the first of its kind, set up 30 years before in Norwich.
A few weeks later I bumped into the Belfast novelist John Morrow, who knew all about my UEA connections. "I see the old master's dead," he said. He meant it in the sense of former teacher, of course, but he was right in the other sense too.
This year, as every year, I began my MA course by telling the students what Bradbury told me: that 95 per cent of what would be said would be of no use. I hope they are as pleasantly surprised as I was at the end of the course to find how wide of the mark that is.
