Fred Inglis's Raymond Williams

...When Raymond Williams died suddenly in 1988, at the age of sixty-six, the tributes were generous and admiring to the point of being fulsome, and he was hailed as, among other things, the greatest socialist thinker of his time in Britain...

...But in his occasional pieces, in particular, he perhaps too often confined himself to asserting this truth in a programmatic way...

...And to a quite extraordinary extent his writing depended not on receiving and re-arranging impressions from outside himself, whether in the form of books, people, or the public world, but on reaching inside himself, and drawing up, as from some inexhaustible but little-varying well, the convictions that he elaborated, restated, and then restated again, undeterred by criticism ("several people report occasions on which he simply didn't read or didn't heed central objections made to some part of his work...

...As with so many successful publicists, the sheer quantity of his writing was important...

...his fiction and a good deal of his cultural criticism revolve around the clash between the human values embodied in workingclass family life and the pretensions and coldnesses that disfigure social relations in the worlds in which the successful scholarship boy later finds himself...

...Elsewhere, more simply, he praises him for "keeping alive a speakable moral idiom of the old Left...

...He has not pursued archival material and correspondence to any great extent...

...Leavis, and in 1946 began a fifteen-year career as an Adult Education Tutor in English for the Oxford Extra-Mural Delegacy...

...Yet as obituary piety starts to give way to more measured assessment, even sympathetic critics cannot help compiling long lists of defects, and the basis of his very considerable standing becomes more and more puzzling or at least in need of some fuller explanation...

...at his death he had pub114 • DISSENT Books lished some thirty books, including five novels, and a scarcely credible abundance of journalism and other occasional writing...

...The book is above all an evocation—an evocation of a man Inglis knew (not well) and admired (a lot), but also an evocation of a world, a milieu, a mood...

...Thompson in the sixties and seventies (and into the eighties as an anti-nuclear campaigner), perhaps Stuart Hall in the late seventies and eighties, and of these only Thompson comes close to sharing Williams's stature as a socialist theorist (or, in his case, anti-theorist...

...In person as well as on the page he clearly gave off a strong sense of wholeness, of someone whose beliefs and experiences and ambitions were all of a piece...

...much of the writing is by turns personal, lyrical, and evocative...

...What is it about Williams and his work that attracted so much admiration and that continues to underwrite his claim to an important niche in recent intellectual history...

...following the pattern of the clever boy from such a background, he won a scholarship to the local grammar school and then, in 1939, entered Trinity College, Cambridge, to begin a degree in English...

...Yet the sense of purpose this suggests, that centered conviction about who he was and about (in the title phrase of a collection of his essays) "what I came to say," is one clue to his remarkable impact...

...In 1955 he published one review essay, in 1956 one article and two pieces in the adult education house journal, in 1957 one article and three reviews...

...And yet the tributes accumulate: for many he remains a model of what a left intellectual should be, and there is already a considerable body of secondary literature whose very existence testifies to a widespread sense that he is a culturally significant figure whose work repays extended investigation...

...As a result, he frequently repeated himself, he published a good deal of slack, substandard writing, he gave hostages with a lavish generosity...

...in the same year he also published a further six reviews in the Guardian, followed by fifteen for the paper the next year and almost three hundred in total during the rest of his career...

...It is, as perhaps the life of any prolific author must be, a portrait of egotism, of the ceaseless, allsubordinating egotism of the writer who gives priority to turning out his daily quota of words...

...And the mark of his most successful writing in this vein, as of comparable figures one might think of, was that he didn't patronize his readers...

...Yet by inclination and talent he was not primarily a theorist, and in some deep ways he always remained parochial rather than international in his outlook: perhaps no one whose intellectual life had been born under the star of Leavis could ever shake off that obsessively local focus (consider by contrast how widely and naturally international someone like, say, Hobsbawm has been...

...his political judgment could be poor...

...Inglis's book is much less of a conventional biography than it first appears...

...There were several figures who benefited from one or more of these developments, but practically no one other than Williams who turned their conjunction into the preconditions for sustained intellectual celebrity...

...And then, into the space made by the break, he dropped his own calm commonplaces about human connection, about solidarity and equality, about those things we had been most fired by as young idealists, and that he—and Leavis before him, in his queer, fierce, intimidating, contradictory way—had best given voice to as an academic, as an educational project...

...He returned to a teaching post at Cambridge in 1961, where he stayed until his early retirement in 1983...

...He grew up in a semi-rural workingclass community just inside the Welsh border...

...Among the best known of his widely selling works were Communications (1962), The Country and the City (1973), Keywords (1976), and Marxism and Literature (1977...

...certainly, the sixties and seventies created a hugely expanded audience in higher education for anyone able to address "academic" issues in an accessible way...

...Exposure and celebrity—the dynamics of what the advertisers call "brand recognition"— are a vital part of the mechanism by which intellectuals, including left intellectuals (who tend to disdain such matters), come to perform their distinctive role...

...Inglis again has to shake his head sadly: "He wrote too much, the colossal discipline wasn't worth all of it...

...This, rather than any claim based on his expertise or his research or even the acuteness of his analysis of the contemporary scene, was the basis of his authority...

...Reading the literature about Williams, written before as well as since his death, one has to recognize that he had many admirers who wanted to idealize him, wanted to overlook the failings, because they wanted there to be in the world a stirring example of that cherished category, the "general intellectual of the Left...

...Williams represented a possibility, a space that many people felt needed to be kept open—a space for the figure who combines academic standing with passionate commitment, who is a leading theorist but also easily accessible, who has reshaped scholarly fields but is far from being a specialist, and who, above all, experiences no inhibiting tension between his intellectual projects and his human needs, between his "work" and his "life...

...In trying to understand Williams's impact, it is partly true, but partly too easy, to say that the timing was right...

...More generally, and especially in the United States, Williams's name is associated SPRING • 1996 • 117 Books above all with "cultural materialism," though very few of his books were explicitly written under the aegis of that late-formulated label...

...In opposition to "English" and to England, two determining preoccupations of his earlier career, he now described himself as a "cultural materialist" and a "Welsh European...

...Since part of the answer (to which I shall return) seems to be bound up with the authority conferred by the exceptionally close fit between his personality, his life, and his work, a biography seems likely to throw an unusual amount of light on this question...

...it is a prose not afraid of trying the high leap and pirouette (not always quite landing on its feet), while at the same time willing to let a demotic gruffness do the work of moral commentary...

...And this relates to the question of range...

...The appearance of his first two books in 1950 and 1952 signaled the start of what was to be an exceptionally prolific writing career, but it was the publication of his fourth book in 1958, Culture and Society, that brought him widespread recognition...

...and so on and so on...

...By turns, this biography metamorphoses into a prose poem to English socialism's best self, an anguished keening for the intellectual left's idealized lost leader, and a meditation on solidarity and its discontents...

...In 1945 he returned to Cambridge to complete his degree, during which period he fell under the spell of F.R...

...And the listings of his other categories of publication tell much the same story...

...He wrote as though there were readers who wanted to be made to think harder than usual...

...He handled these abstractions with the decisiveness of a grandmaster moving the pieces in a simultaneous exhibition, yet curiously, given his endlessly reiterated use of terms like "concrete" and "particular," it could sometimes seem as though his very familiarity with the terms had worn them smooth, so that they no longer snagged any actual detail of experience...

...And it was essentially a kind of moral authority, expressed in serious, unshowy prose, an authority that came from the sense that he had connected, re-connected, a given topic to the great verities of human need and social relationship...

...Other biographers are already at work, and no doubt there will be more thorough, more scholarly, and in some ways more usable lives to come...

...And by the end its faults come to seem a necessary and not always unreasonable price to pay for some marvelous cadenzas on unlikely themes—on the culture of the railway signal-box, or on the finger-numbing chill in the bleak, drafty halls in which adult education classes took place immediately after 1945, or on the "espresso-and-existentialism" atmosphere of the early New Left...

...If, after the great success of Culture and Society in 1958, Williams had then fallen silent while devoting six or eight years to the research for his next book, this biography would most probably not have been written...

...But grant it its own tune, and it will carry you along with rare buoyancy...

...Fred Inglis's Raymond Williams is the first extended account of the life to have appeared, but although it is an affectionate and perceptive portrait, in some ways it does more to deepen than to resolve the puzzle...

...But the book is distinguished above all by Inglis's writerly energy, here essaying a novelistic sketch, there interjecting a remembered vignette...

...There are many vantage points from which much of Williams's writing is now in danger of seeming overblown and overrated, but part of the achievement of Inglis's unusual, flawed, and impressive book is to make us understand, make us feel, that if one were struggling to give expression to one's socialist convictions by teaching the imaginatively liberating power of literature to children in a state school within the still deeply classstructured society of 1960s Britain, then Williams's writings would fall as Scripture, manna, and textbook rolled into one...

...Inglis's writing asks for, and needs, the reader's indulgence: once one gets out of sorts with it, a catalogue of failings will irresistibly start to compile itself...

...He wrote his immensely influential little book on analyzing the popular media, Communications, without owning a television...

...Both his studies and a brief membership of the Communist party were interrupted by the war, and he saw active service commanding an armored anti-tank unit in the Normandy invasion and subsequent campaigns...

...There is much evidence in this book of what an unresponsive cornpanion Williams could be—his star pupil Terry Eagleton speaks of his "clenched withdrawal...

...he was a professor of drama who practically never went to the theater...

...He wrote too much...

...His writing, at whatever level of theoretical sophistication, embodied the conviction that literature, politics, society, the media, everyday life were all part of a connected and mutually determining whole whose elements we were bound to distort if we studied them in isolation from each other...

...large expanses of the prose are unfootnoted...

...Culture and Society is now venerated as one of the founding texts of the cultural studies movement, though its frame of reference, informing perspective, and initial impact were all highly, almost aggressively, local...

...The tendentiousness evident in this contrast seems the more culpable when we learn from Inglis of the tensions that dominated the actual Williams home...

...For all the misgivings one may have about both his writing and his ideas, there is no doubt that Williams had—to use one of the cant words of our time, though not his—an "enabling" effect on hundreds of thousands of readers...

...In its outward aspect, Williams's life was not particularly unusual or exciting...

...After a certain point, his opinions were printed because he had become the sort of person whose opinions were printed...

...He was born in 1921, the only child of a railway signalman and his wife...

...he was an organizer of the left who could rarely be reached by telephone...

...He was intermittently prominent in various left-wing causes, though frequently and increasingly disillusioned with the Labour Party...

...And as a result, there were...

...Certainly, the question of "authentic" working-class voices acquired a sudden prominence in metropolitan literary and intellectual circles in the late fifties in Britain...

...Although in his books Williams, it has to be said, could be an excep118 • DISSENT Books tionally dreary writer, "conjuring weight out of abstraction" as Eagleton accurately and unkindly put it, he could be, and often was, a notably effective journalist and reviewer—direct, engaged, instructive...

...By the time of his death, he had for some years been emphasizing his distance both from the criticism and teaching of English literature as conventionally understood, and from the chief institutional expressions of British politics and culture...

...Hoggart was his nearest rival in the late fifties and early sixties, E.P...

...This was the telos around which domestic life was arranged, around which his marriage shaped itself, and around which he neglected his students, was only half-available for his friends, kept his distance from the world...

...The kind of turning point represented by that book's success can be crudely indicated by the following figures from the bibliography of Williams's work prepared by Alan O'Connor (Raymond Williams: Writing, Culture, Politics [Oxford: Blackwell, 1989...

...It is part of Inglis's achievement that this porSPRING • 1996 • 115 Books trait of a man he greatly admired and wanted to like leaves even the sympathetic reader with a strong sense of the ways in which Williams was neither wholly admirable nor easily likeable...

...he often wrote badly...

...1:1 SPRING • 1996 • 119...

...This remains a seductive and perhaps necessary ideal, and perhaps Raymond Williams came as close as anyone in recent years to embodying it...

...But it was all part of the mechanism of reputation, all part of becoming "Raymond Williams...

...If the intellectual is "the specialist in the general," then there can be no staying within the narrow confines of expertise...

...he was the great evangelist for the values of "community" who unflinchingly ignored all claims that might interfere with his solitude—the solitude necessary for the daily indulgence of his habit, his private vice, his only partly socialized addiction to the typewriter...

...Inglis is responsive to the loyalties and commitments informing Williams's work, rather less good as an analyst of their theoretical ambitions and shortcomings (while his brief discussions of the ideas of the likes of Wittgenstein and Kant almost seem designed to undermine the reader's confidence in his authority...

...This owed something to the circumstances of Britain from the late fifties to the early seventies, certainly, but it also reflected his willingness to try to connect the more austere realms of intellectual inquiry to the often puzzling realities of thoughtful people's everyday lives...

...all of them date from after the publication of Culture and Society...

...certainly the early sixties was the time to be a 116 • DISSENT Books rising star of the intellectual left...

...The book, it will be clear, has its faults, but it is never boring, and that is a remarkable achievement given Williams's capacity to be a relentlessly boring writer and, it would seem, in some ways a boring man...

...Inglis's book may well strike some non-British readers as too readily collusive with that parochialism, too little appreciative of what Williams, like any theorist, has to say to those who grew up in utterly different national circumstances...

...And the book helps us generalize this particular, informing case, and thus to come closer to understanding how Williams did something for hundreds of thousands of readers...

...much of what he wrote has been subjected to damning and justifeed criticism...

...His own working-class background was the professional diploma that licensed him to practise this peculiar trade, and Williams was not slow to display his credentials in this respect...

...and large slabs of quotation are taken, oral-history fashion, from the transcripts of interviews or letters to Inglis from people who knew Williams in various capacities...

...O'Connor's extraordinary bibliography also reveals that Williams published ninety-one chapters, introductions, and similar contributions to books...

...In practice, his international reputation only took off once he began to engage with the work of the leading Western Marxist theorists in the early seventies...

...But it is hard to imagine that any of these future studies will contain as many passages of inspired, moving portraiture as this one does...

...Williams first became a father when he was twenty-three, and he went on to become a father figure to many on the left with no less precocity...

...Inglis sadly remarks "a certain unthinkingness in some of his theoretic labours in the 1970s," and flatly describes Marxism and Literature, now probably his most widely known work, as "his unreadable book," though there can be no doubt that "cultural materialism" was the strike force that earned Williams a place at the negotiating table of international high theorists...

...He made much of being the son of a railway worker (characteristically, the pre-feminist Williams—and he remained unreconstructedly pre-feminist to the end—presented himself as having only one relevant parent...

...But the emphasis and inwardness seem to me right and illuminating...

...But it is not easy to account for this standing...

...Often, there is not much "information" in his writing, not much close analysis of other people's work, not a carefully elaborated conceptual scheme: there is just that determined, massively confident, assertion that he spoke out of a grounded, elemental hold on the imperatives of the ethical enterprise of collective living...

...Inglis brings out well just how seriously Williams took the task of addressing a wide readership, and just how much journalism and occasional writing he did...

...This is not to suggest that it is of no account what those opinions were or how persuasively they helped make sense of parts of his readers' experience...

...His contract with them was to explain as clearly and persuasively as he could what he thought mattered about a given issue or book...

...As Inglis reports, he practically never turned down a commission or a request...

...Inglis makes no pretense at writing like a visiting anthropologist: this is his own tribe, and he understands, loves, and is exasperated by the same sentiments and rituals that bore Williams's career along...

...But in 1959 alone he published seventeen essays and reviews of various kinds...

...Having quoted an autobiographical tribute by Eagleton, Inglis glosses: That's what he [Williams] most characteristically did: he broke with the established, calmly superior assumptions and way of talking in England, but did so with a manner, an idiom and diction themselves so unassailably assured that those on the wrong side of the break couldn't see how to stop him...

...Williams's career also raises interesting questions about the tensions between reaching local and international audiences...

...However well or badly we now judge that Williams carried out this task, his life is a reminder of the need for those who can put recent events or new books in a wider historical and intellectual context, or coin phrases that disturb or corrode unreflectively held assumptions, or give people tools to think with, or—above all—just write in a serious, engaged but analytical way about things that are either treated superficially elsewhere or not treated at all...

...Part of Williams's appeal lay in the way in which he calmly disregarded the border guards who patrol the boundaries between disciplines and, still more, between academic endeavor and political and social activism...

...It is interesting to note in passing how unlike the traditional two-parent-and-several-children model of the warm, expressive working-class home were the family situations of both Williams and Richard Hoggart, the two most notable spokesmen for working-class culture in their generation: the orphaned Hoggart grew up in an almost entirely female household of grandmother and aunts, while the only child Williams observed from an early age the distance between his increasingly silent parents...