Doctor Criminale by Malcolm Bradbury

is
he?’
    Then suddenly the door flew open, hefted by Lavinia’s vast shoulders, and she was all over me. ‘Okay, you, Francis,’ she said, ‘Just explain to me what’s happening.
You’ve been working on this eight days and as far as I know you’ve come up with nothing.’ ‘I thought there was plenty,’ I said, ‘The refutation of Adorno, the
quarrel with Heidegger—’ ‘Heidegger Schmeidegger,’ said Lavinia, looking at me with pity, ‘Darling, you’re not writing your doctoral dissertation or an article
for
TLS
. You’re researching a TV programme. We don’t want to know what the old bugger thinks. If there’s thinking in the programme he can sit there and do it himself. I
want a plot, a life, a person. Tell me how he looks, who his friends are, who he screws, where he drinks, why he matters. Find me where he is.’ ‘That’s not easy,’ I said,
‘He lives up in the air on jumbo jets most of the time. Just now he seems to be holed up somewhere, writing another book.’ ‘God, not
another
book,’ said Lavinia,
‘Come over here, darling. Sit on the sofa by me. Now listen, I’d like you to forget the philosophical conundrums. I don’t want to hear any more about the symbolism of feet in
Homeless
. I want a living, breathing, fallible human being, just like you and me, Francis, only more so.
Capeesh?
’
    I looked at her. ‘But Bazlo Criminale is a Modern Master, Lavinia,’ I said. ‘Right, darling,’ said Lavinia, ‘And I expect if you turn over a Modern Master,
you’ll probably find a Modern Mistress. Honey, I want life and loves. I want friends and enemies. I want flesh and bones. I want peaks and troughs, failures and successes. I want locations,
cities, houses, churches, parks. I want some people we can get our teeth into. I don’t want quarrels with Schmeidegger on being and non-being. I know he wrote a lot, darling. That
doesn’t mean you have to. Just give me ten pages: life, loves, family, sex, money, politics. You have two more days, and then I’ll personally come and gut you. Find something we can use
on television. It’s a fleshy human medium, with great stories. Is that my taxi? Terrific, all right, bye-bye darlings.’ ‘That bitch,’ said Ros, as we watched Lavinia
climbing heavily into the taxi in the little street outside, ‘She’s jealous, of course. Did you like her?’ ‘Well, not entirely,’ I admitted. ‘Oh,
brilliant,’ said Ros, ‘She always pulls stunts like this to take my men away from me.’ ‘The problem is, what am I supposed to do next?’ I asked. ‘Come upstairs
and I’ll show you,’ said Ros. ‘No, I mean about Criminale,’ I said. ‘Do what Lavinia says,’ said Ros, ‘Everyone does what Lavinia says. Write ten simple
pages. Break him down into segments.’ ‘Give him the treatment?’ ‘Yes,’ said Ros, ‘Come on.’
    And so, over the next few days, when Ros wasn’t giving me the treatment, I set about Criminale. This may sound easy; it proved very difficult. There was no great problem about the works
and the thought, and good old Scruton was a great help here. It was when I turned to the life that the hard graft began. In one sense, no one was more visible than Bazlo Criminale. His photograph
– the mop of hair going from grey to white, the big bulky body, the sense of brooding presence – was in all the magazines. The man went everywhere. As I learned from
People
magazine, which had profiled him (twice), he lunched and dined with everyone who was anyone. He sat down nightly with Greek shipowners and Nobel prizewinners (many asked why he had not had one
himself), with deep Buddhist thinkers and leading tennis stars, Umberto Eco and the Dalai Lama, Glenn Close and Pol Pot, Arnold Schwarzenegger and Hans-Dietrich Genscher. The first-class
stewardesses on every major airline knew him on sight, and had his favourite drink (an Amaretto) and his own embroidered slippers warmed and ready for him when he boarded a