Up to Downing

I'm still reading along in David Ellis's Memoirs of a Leavisite and enjoying it, especially since as Ellis himself says at one point, he "was only ever a tepid Leavisite" (54).  His discussion of class and politics is quite good, or maybe I just mean that he agrees with me about a lot of things.  But I'm especially enjoying his critique of Leavis's nostalgia for the days when the common Englishman lived in a web of interrelations with the Earth, Nature, and his fellow Englishman.

Apparently Leavis was fond of The Wheelwright's Shop, by George Sturt, who gave up teaching grammar school in 1884 to run the family wheelwright shop, and wrote numerous books about his experience.  Leavis's students treated this fondness with amused scepticism.  Ellis allows that The Wheelwright's Shop "is in many respects a finely written book but I was a poor audience for it" (56).

... I was receptive to Leavis's picture of the general poor state of contemporary society and where popular culture then stood ("Distracted from distraction by distraction"); but I was not so sure it had ever been much better.  Sturt's employees may well have had far more satisfaction in their work than Chaplin's frantic factory hand in Modern Times, or those I had met on the assembly line in Kellogg's, but quite how much more they would have had to have in order to compensate for their long hours, poor pay and scant provision for sickness and old age was not clear to me.  Besides, even the the exquisite craftsmanship involved in making a good cart might become tedious, and therefore unsatisfying, when you have been doing it over and over again for thirty years.  A further satisfaction the employees enjoyed, Sturt implied, was integration into a traditional social organization where people cared for each other and there was a general acceptance of mutual duties and responsibilities, where, in the words of Tawney, society was 'a spiritual organism, and not an economic machine'.  This is what Leavis used to call the 'organic community'.  That gave to its members  both the security and comfort of knowing where they stood but chiefly because, it seemed to me, there was never ever much likelihood of their being able to stand anywhere else [56].

This is very good, and to it could be added the writings of Fred Kitchen, an older contemporary of Leavis himself.  Kitchen was a miner and farm worker who produced several books about life as a laborer in the early 20th century.  The "organic community" was also something of a spider's web, where one moved from place to place with difficulty if at all, and as Ellis says, "there was never much likelihood of their being able to stand anywhere else."  (Despite fantasies of universal rootedness in the good old days, both external circumstances -- war, famine, pestilence, civil upheavals -- and internal restlessness ensured that despite the difficulties and dangers, many people, both men and women, did stand elsewhere, moving and migrating in search of adventure or a simple change of scenery.)  For all that Leavis wasn't a typical British academic of his generation -- his class background was non-U, and because of his name he was often thought to be Jewish -- there's still some cognitive dissonance in a professor of literature, safely ensconced in the university system, daydreaming about the delights of traditional English country life which he himself couldn't have endured for more than about a week, if for no other reason that like any other bookworm, he'd soon go nuts without a good library near at hand.  (As one of Andrew Holleran's characters pointed out in Dancer from the Dance, Thoreau built his cabin in the woods in search of solitude, but he went into Concord every day to gossip with his fellow literati, and as someone else pointed out, he took his laundry home for his mom to wash.)

Ellis goes on:

... I pointed out to a friend that if, as all the scholars say, the English language was in a particularly vibrant and expanding state when Shakespeare came on the scene, it was as much because of the economic and cultural forces which broke up the village communities Eliot is describing [in "Burnt Norton"] as of those communities themselves.  But he merely nodded wearily and cited Popper's remark that, when you see someone struggling in a bog, the last thing you should do is jump in after him, and it is true that there is not much to be made of the very broad cultural generalisations which both the Leavises were inclined to make throughout their careers.  Perhaps they were right to believe that the disappearance of the organic community has brought us immeasurable loss; but if 'immeasurable' becomes an appropriate word and there is a then a great deal of difficulty in defining the 'us' referred to in the formulation.  Any statement about the cultural well-being of a past society or community considered as a bloc is vulnerable to the citing of exceptions.  This is why, in spite of F. L. Lucas's glaring prejudice and unfairness, a remark he makes about Mrs Leavis's notion of entertainment for the masses being on a steady downward curve remains relevant to what she and her husband had to say on that subject long after Fiction and the Reading Public had appeared.  'It is surely a great deal better,' he wrote, 'to like the trashiest fiction than to enjoy seeing a witch burnt, or to go to the silliest cinema than to soak in an eighteenth-century gin-shop' [57; emphasis added].

I think I'll have that last quotation embroidered on a sampler to give to RWA1 next Christmas, in honor of all his bleating about 'the culture going into the toilet.'

For all that, though, it sounds like Mrs Leavis's Fiction and the Reading Public is worth a read.  She seems to have been, like many achieving women of her generation, a proto-feminist who rejected the Second Wave for mainly generational reasons.  She was affected by the glass ceiling at Cambridge, where despite exemplary teaching and publications she never got a full teaching position.  And what Ellis has to say about both Leavises' cultural materialism -- their willingness to take economic and other social factors into account in the meaning of literature -- and their class backgrounds made me wonder what they thought about Raymond Williams, the great Marxist historian of literature and culture, originally a scholarship boy from rural Wales, who taught at Cambridge at Jesus College while the Leavises taught at Downing.  I looked for Williams in the index, and lo:

How fortunate I was to have had [Leavis's support] was brought home to me much later by a friend and colleague who went to Cambridge only a few years after I did.  A working class boy from Liverpool, he lived in St Edmond's, then a Catholic 'house of residence', while he was reading English at Fitzwilliam. For reasons not easy to explain, there were strong ties between Leavis and some of the priests at St Edmond's, as well as with other Catholic groups.  They too may have felt beleaguered and it may be also that they had detected in his writing a whiff of that nostalgia for the pre-industrial many of them shared ('Ah, there's a donkey', exclaims the priest in a Catholic joke, 'this country must be Catholic').  Whatever the explanation, relations between Leavis and St Edmond's were close so that my friend found himself often having tea with him there, and then being invited back to the Leavises' house.  When he decided to apply for a State Studentship he had received a sufficient number of encouraging signs from Leavis and felt he knew him well enough to request his support.  He was asked who the other referees were and, on explaining that one was Raymond Williams, found the support denied.  'Oh don't be silly, Frank', Mrs Leavis apparently then said, 'if you won't do it, I will' [81].

Memoirs of a Leavisite is turning out to be more entertaining than I expected.

I want to add, though: Ellis remarks of this last story that "this is about the worst thing I ever heard about [Leavis] (and the best about his wife)."  Ellis isn't, as should be clear by now, an uncritical disciple of his teacher.  But I think this story isn't especially "bad" -- that's the trouble with it.  Leavis' willingness to indulge in petty personal feuding with colleagues for ill-defined reasons appears to be quite common in academia, and elsewhere, among supposed adults of good standing in society, so I'm not singling him out: that's exactly my point, he was all too normal in letting grudges and petty grievances turn into feuds that ended up affecting students who had nothing to do with the original grievances.  (No wonder Norman Podhoretz got along well with him.)  Ellis speculates that Leavis refused (at first? it's not clear whether or not he changed his mind) to referee the application as "a protest on Leavis's part against my friend's patent Marxism," but I wonder if Leavis himself could have explained it coherently.  But notice that someone like Leavis could still at times produce useful, well-thought out analysis of literature, maybe even of society; it's not an all-or-nothing thing.  This is why even the most distinguished authorities on all kinds of subjects -- including people I like and respect -- must be read critically and with due skepticism, always.

Not Fit to Eat with the Hogs

I checked out David Ellis's Memoirs of a Leavisite: The decline and fall of Cambridge English (Liverpool, 2013) because it was short, looked readable, and had a subtitle delicately imbued with apocalyptic hysteria.  ("Cambridge English" refers to the Cambridge University English literature degree, which was only initiated in the 1920s.  That means it has been around less than a century, and less than half a century when Ellis was an undergraduate at Cambridge.  The academic world existed without English literature programs for hundreds of years, and if they disappear, it will manage without them.)  I was also curious to see an account of F. R. Leavis by one of his former students, especially if it touched on Leavis's notorious attack on C. P. Snow.  (It does.)  Ellis is now Professor Emeritus of English as the University of Kent, Canterbury, and among his other works is a controversial book about biographies of Shakespeare, which looks interesting.  So far the book is engaging enough.

So, what does Ellis have to say about his mentor as a critic?  I've really only begun the book, but I found two revealing anecdotes early on.  Defending Leavis against Stephen Fry's characterization of him as a "sanctimonious prick," Ellis points out that despite Leavis's puritanical streak, he also insisted on discussing raunchy books like Joyce's Ulysses and Lawrence's Lady Chatterley's Lover with his students, despite "official disfavour" (16).  "Leavis was no prude but he was, as I say, a moralist and moral values are always going to play a part in any fully responsive reading of literature.  The danger comes when our judgement of a work of art begins to hinge on our approval or otherwise of certain attitudes, however well they may be represented.  Signs of such a tendency can no doubt be found scattered throughout Leavis's writing ... but I can remember two hints of it in his seminars" (16-17).

One came when he was considering Samuel Butler's The Way of All Flesh, which begins with what is generally acknowledged to be a satirical portrait of its author's father.  In the course of his discussion, his thoughts turned musingly to Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, the individual in charge when the Cambridge English degree was first launched in the early 1920s ... [Leavis] had once heard 'Q' say about Butler, he reflected, that no man should ever turn on his father and I felt that this was so much his own view that he found it difficult to consider The Way of All Flesh objectively.  I did not know then had Leavis had been particularly attached to his own father who died after a motor-cycle accident at about the same time that he himself began his final degree examination [17].

This looks to me like a common tendency in literary-critical moralism.  I agree with Ellis that moral values are always going to play a part in any fully responsive reading of literature.  I'm a moralist myself, but my values are different from Leavis's, and that also affects my response to what I read.  I don't object to Leavis letting his personal history affect his reading of Butler; anyone's life and circumstances will make it difficult or impossible to appreciate some works.  What I do expect from a professional critic, whether academic or journalistic, is that he or she be aware of the blind spots with which experience has endowed him or her, and take them into account.  I don't see anything shameful in saying something like "I loved my father, so I can't make sense of Butler's hatred of his."  But a person who's read as widely as a Professor of English Literature must read also has to be aware that not all fathers inspire love in their children.  Some are abusive, some abandon -- in short, they "turn on" their children.  To "turn on his father" is not necessarily easy or pleasant, but it sometimes must be done simply in order to survive.  Failure to recognize this is, in my opinion, a moral failure.  This would work both ways, of course: the child of a hateful father would be remiss not to recognize that not all fathers deserve to be rejected by their children.

Ellis continues:

The more serious hint of moral feelings over-riding critical judgement concerned Proust ... But what Leavis appeared to object to, as he elaborated his view, was Proust's constant preoccupation with his homosexuality and the way in which, as the novel proceeds, a surprisingly [sic] number of the characters turn out to be gay.  There seemed to me at the time a suggestion of moral disapproval when Leavis mentioned this and that it was one which prevented him from appreciating to the full a social satirist as vivid and entertaining as Austen, Dickens or George Eliot, and one of the most subtle analysts of human motive in literature.  It cannot, I suppose, have helped that Proust was a major figure in the value system of his enemies in King's College and in Bloomsbury [17].

I can't clearly distinguish here between Leavis's opinions and Ellis's, but my goodness: "Proust's constant preoccupation with his homosexuality"?  I have only gotten through the first two volumes of Proust's big novel, and haven't yet arrived at the queer parts.  I don't recall any evidence of a preoccupation with anyone's homosexuality in the first thousand or so pages.  But who ever complains about writers' "constant preoccupation" with their heterosexuality in most literature?  Jane Austen could, by this criterion, be said to be preoccupied with her characters' heterosexuality, or Ernest Hemingway with his, or Dickens, or George Eliot.  But that's considered normal, like a white writer's preoccupation with the problems white people have in today's world.

As for those "enemies in King's College and in Bloomsbury," many of whom were sods and buggers, this is something I've noticed before in other writers and critics.  How often does criticism of other writers or teachers hide personal squabbles and dislikes?  Quite often, I've come to realize.  But again, to react in this way is a moral failure as well as a failure of the critical faculty.  It might well be that one's personal animosities might make it hard, even impossible to do justice to work by those one dislikes.  But an adult should be aware of this, and make allowance for it, admitting if necessary that one can't write objectively or rationally about this or that figure, and recusing oneself.  I suppose that if this rule were generally observed, we'd have a lot less critical prose, but that might not be such a bad thing.

I give David Ellis credit for acknowledging Leavis's feet of clay, but I wonder if these stories aren't meant as a distraction from other offenses.  (Just as many Obama fans will throw a few crumbs to his harsher critics by admitting that this or that policy "disappoints" them.)  I decided to read his book, after all, because of Leavis's attack on C. P. Snow, which apparently was one that led its publishers to approach Snow to make sure he wouldn't take legal action against them for printing it.  (Britain's libel laws are stricter than those of the United States, I gather.)  Ellis devotes four pages of his book to a discussion of Leavis's opinions of Snow; I peeked ahead, and I don't see any mention of that aspect of the controversy.  Well, I'll see when I get there.  I should probably read Leavis's lecture on The Two Cultures, too.  The examples Ellis gives about Leavis's literary moralism are enough, however, to indicate the weaknesses of that critical approach.