Ian MacKillop's F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism

...PETER MANDLER teaches modern history at London Guildhall University...

...IAN MAC KIL LOP'S biography—the first full biographical treatment of Leavis—does not attempt literary or political analysis on the scale of Mulhern's book, which MacKillop politely recommends...

...These superficial similarities are telling, but it is the differences that are crucial to understanding both the man and the environment within which he worked...

...But almost immediately Williams differentiated himself from what he considered to be Leavis's elitism and his excessive "literariness...

...He immersed himself in one parochial Cambridge struggle after another (though some of these—such as his clashes with Bloomsbury and with C.P...

...If not quite an immigrant, he was an upwardly mobile outsider, smashing his way into the literary establishment from an upbringing in the Cambridge lower middle class, only streets away physically but worlds away culturally from the university where he would spend most of his adult life...

...He shared Trotsky's view that the great literature of the past should be revered as a conduit for the greatness of past civilizations and also that modern writers should be looked to for equivalent expressions of the greatness of the present...

...Forster, Roger Fry, even in his way John Maynard Keynes— but it was not quite so good a standpoint from which to launch an attack on "society...

...Shakespeare, Austen, George DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 133 BOOKS Eliot, and Henry James were the foundations of "the great tradition," but D.H...

...In some ways MacKillop (who studied with Leavis at Downing) is a paid-up member of the cult, and he performs some splendid acrobatics to excuse Leavis's faults...

...Certainly he was an Old Testament kind of person, with his background in radical nonconformity and his angular, prophetic, puritanical self-presentation...

...While his students went out into the world and tried to establish Leavisite outposts at Exeter and Swansea, in America and the Antipodes, Leavis to the end of his days undermined their efforts by seeking to keep the group tightly focused on his own person and his immediate Cambridge circle...

...He was generally hostile to the British Broadcasting Corporation and regarded even the highbrow weeklies, like the Times Literary Supplement, with suspicion...

...Queenie once said that her husband "would have been one of Cromwell's generals" in the English Civil War...

...Despite his passionate belief that literary criticism should be a collective enterprise, he had terribly narrow ideas about what form that collective should take, which almost guaranteed his criticism would be isolated— not only from society, as the New Left complained, but from most other critics as well...

...The sense of connection implied by leadership was important to Leavis—he had no patience for the lonely genius of the Romantics...

...The critical function was even more important in a postindustrial world where literature was becoming progressively divorced from daily life by specialization, materialism, and the coarsening effects of the mass media...

...My favorite MacKillopism is his defense of Leavis against the charge of paranoia on the ground that such accusations are meaningless because deconstructive psychiatrists no longer believe in "external reality" (an argument supplied to him by a Leavisite psychologist...

...Leavis's early reputation, in the interwar years, was based on his championing of modernism (in the work of Lawrence, T.S...

...Leavis believed that the writings of poets and novelists had to be worked on by an elite minority in surroundings effectively sheltered from mass culture...

...Upon his retirement from Downing in 1962, he split angrily with his old college and even from his closest acolytes over the choice of his successor—shades again of the New York Intellectuals— and decamped grumpily to the new university at York...

...In the 1950s Williams lectured on one of Leavis's pet topics—the "great tradition" in the English novel, from Dickens to Lawrence— yet what he valued in the great English novels was not their experiments in language nor their 134 n DISSENT / Fan 1998 ability to create a community of transcendent interpreters of the English scene, but rather their insights into the lived experience of the English people...

...But he was never comfortable there and treated it more as a place of exile than as an alternative base, a model for a new generation...

...Criticisms of Leavis are broken up into component parts and analyzed down to the minutest particulars in a very Leavisian way, chopping down the trees one by one until the forest is magicked away...

...Leavis's celebrated inconsistency on the subject of Dickens's greatness is fudged with righteous indignation...

...This concept might have—Leavis clearly thought it did—defined a special status for the university in society that, in a period of rapidly burgeoning higher education, could serve as an effective pulpit...

...It was the critic who could identify for a wider public the canon, the tradition, the representative of the age, who could explain what literature had to say and how it worked...

...In the same oblique way, he was almost a Marxist...

...Not only was Leavis untypical of any kind of intellectual elite at any time, he and his followers have always been marginal to the world of the British university, especially compared to the followers of Raymond Williams—who currently occupy top jobs in the English faculties of all the leading British universities, without any obviously revolutionary consequences...

...Queenie Leavis's major work, Fiction and the Reading Public, aimed to show how popular culture had been irretrievably polluted by modern materialism—there was nothing salvageable there...

...This divorce damaged the Leavises, but it damaged the New Left, too...

...The weird world of Leavis and his Cambridge contemporaries is displayed as compellingly and colorfully here as anywhere I can think of, with plenty of explanatory asides for outsiders that will help them wend their way into the center of the maze...

...Mulhern concludes that this Leavisite move insulated the "hegemonic" culture from the revolutionary shocks that might otherwise have brought it down in the 1960s and 1970s—precisely the kind of Gramscian thinking typical of cultural studies in its Marxist phase that Leavis would have found risible...

...Leavis was the most magnetic figure within "Cambridge English" when Williams entered it in the late 1940s, and to some extent Leavis considered Williams as part of his camp...

...and he was often taken for a Jew, described by one Cambridge undergraduate as dressing and speaking "like a member of the Knesset in its early days...

...As the Bloomsberries proved, literature was quite a good standpoint from which to launch an attack on "culture" as it had been narrowly defined by the Victorians—thus the lasting influence of Virginia Woolf, E.M...

...This work, he felt, could be as alive and as useful to the British of the 1930s as Tolstoy and Dickens had been to the Victorians or Shakespeare to the Elizabethans...

...the subsequent missteps of cultural studies—its credulity in finding elements of "resistance" in the crassest forms of commercial culture, its capitulation on the one hand to a crude Gramscian understanding of elite culture and on the other to depoliticized and decontextualized postmodern "readings" of popular culture—could have used a dose of the Leavises' skepticism and independence...

...If this sounds all too reminiscent of Allan Bloom or William Bennett, it should be remembered that Leavis—like Trotsky—expected the moderns to carry on the good work of the classics...

...A critic of industrialism rather than capitalism, he resembled the guild socialists in regretting the loss of the organic agrarian community, the class separation, and the moral and cultural coarsening that he thought modern materialism had brought about...

...The wider contexts of debates and disputes are richly recounted, sometimes in amusingly Leavisian style and detail, but never tediously...

...Though not Jewish himself, his wife and constant collaborator, Queenie Roth Leavis, was...

...At one point he even grants that there was a "suicidal strand in Leavisian ideology," but then scurries away from the admission in embarrassment...

...In the end, however, MacKillop's partiality causes him to excuse, but never to obscure, Leavis's grotesqueries...

...No, my dear," he corrected her, "I would have been Cromwell...

...Williams was not the only pioneer of cultural studies to fall within their grasp only to wriggle out of it—Stuart Hall also began his writing career as a Leavisite...

...It is hard, therefore, to share the view of Francis Mulhern—author of the most systematic study of Leavis's thought and role, The Moment of Scrutiny'—that Leavis represented a turning point in the recomposition of the intellectual elite, one that both broadened its personnel beyond the upper classes (taking in "meritocrats" like Leavis himself) and broadened its social message by taking on board Leavis's limited critique of capitalism...

...His latest book is The Fall and Rise of the Stately Home (Yale University Press, 1997...

...He had a following that was just as tightly knit, as paranoid, as addicted to its own jargon, as any Marxist sect, and people in Cambridge spoke of "Leavisites" as they would speak in New York of "Lovestoneites...

...Both in order to express fully the whole of society's creative life, and in order to make a truly democratic critique of the anti-creative thrust of modern capitalism, it was necessary to define "culture" far more broadly so as to take in the experiences, the value-systems, and the representational practices of popular culture—even of "mass culture...

...This the Leavises would not brook...

...But the biographical view illuminates more clearly Leavis's failure to transform literary studies than does Mulhern's ambitious overestimate...

...Lawrence was (in Leavis's youth) its living exponent...

...Here he fell prey not so much to the limitations of his ideology as to the sectarianBOOKS ism of his style...

...The novelist and, especially, the poet were the most precious interpreters of the human experience and thus at least potentially the leaders of the species...

...The charge that Leavis only cared about a novel's moral qualities is rebutted with Leavis's conception of the "novel as dramatic poem," but DISSENT / Fall 1998 n 135 BOOKS this conception is never brought to life (nor, I think, does Leavis ever fully explain it in his work, whereas stern lectures on literary characters' moral qualities, or lack of same, abound...

...Modern work with this potential for social usefulness had carefully to be separated from work that lacked it—such as the effete, self-indulgent poses of Bloomsbury (which also had its principal academic outpost in Cambridge...

...In these last years his public pronouncements narrowed tightly on a defense of his ideal of the university against the new models then proliferating—mass education, high-tech education, "functional" education— what Leavis sneeringly referred to as the "orthodoxies of enlightenment...

...Queenie...

...There was a party line and a party journal (Scrutiny, which ran from 1932 to 1953), modeled on American precursors, and cadres were sent out from Cambridge to colonize other universities...

...Only a biography, it may be, can convey properly just why the Leavises were so magnetic and why, too, they were so decisively self-defeating...

...Snow—had wider significance...

...136 n DISSENT / Fall 1998...

...The critiques, both from sworn enemies and estranged students, are meticulously cited in full and readers are at liberty to ignore the exculpation and reach their own conclusions...

...As a student of culture he strove, in marxisant fashion, to link art and literature to the social relations in which they were embedded—"anthropologico-literary" work he called it—and admired Trotsky's Literature and Revolution for its nonreductive linkage of culture and "environment...

...The title of the Leavisite journal derived from Leavis's comment on the need "to do the criticism that is not done in the commercial press, and to focus a 'minority' scrutiny upon contemporary civilization...

...THUS THE Leavises cut themselves off from that section of the rising generation— the socialist (and later the New Left) section—that should have been most responsive to their call...

...MacKillop characterizes Leavis's famous touchiness as "not absurd...

...Especially after the demise of Scrutiny, Leavis preferred to issue his key pronouncements as privately printed or cyclostyled pamphlets for internal circulation, or as lectures to undergraduate clubs...

...For one thing, in the relationship between society and literature, it was always literature—the very pith and core of civilization—that had for Leavis the upper hand...

...But in practice Leavis seemed to think that the members of his minority could only be properly trained in the intimate group setting of an Oxbridge college—and, really, only in his college, Downing College, Cambridge...

...But it was not enough...

...The prophetic status of the writer gave a literary critic like Leavis a priestly role as interpreter for the interpreter...

...On his other flank, the academic "Establishment," Leavis was only slightly more influential...

...He tiptoes around the bizarre way in which Leavis both exploited and protected (and feared...

...Eliot, Ezra Pound, Isaac Rosenberg, and more obscure figures) as representing in form and content the spirit of the present age...

...In his own masterpiece, Culture and Society, Williams tackled directly the emergence of cultural criticism—the inventors of a "culture" that expressed for the people the "best" of their own experiences, from Matthew Arnold to Leavis himself—but closed by criticizing the critics...

...It was a good thing, Williams said, to invent an idea of culture that was a blast against bourgeois society—obviously preferable to Bloomsbury's fastidious snobbery...

...The greatest writers made experiments with language that were at the same time personal and "objective," accessible to others, expanding the resources of the language in a way that enriched the whole of society...

...These peculiarities of Leavis—and he was, above all else, a very peculiar man—left him in a no-man's-land between literature and politics that, it is hard to avoid the conclusion, diminished fatally his wider impact...

...We can see the limitations in considering Leavis's influence on Raymond Williams and on the unfolding of cultural studies...