The Grievous Dr. Leavis

...The Scrutiny school and its leading authority have especial appeal to secondary school teachers of an intellectual bent, sophisticated clergymen, and university professors who value conservatism under cover of suavity...

...Grundy . . . profound corrective impulse . . . discovery of his vocation...

...Leavis completely misses the deep and sharp irony of Anna Karenina's opening line: "All happy families are alike, every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way...

...James," Leavis tells us, "who hadn't Public School Classics and Aristotle and Oxford behind him...

...Lady Chatterley's Lover, then—it is important that this obvious enough truth should be recognized—is a bad novel [and] violates Lawrence's own essential canons as an artist...

...for the race, as it were...

...And the recognized writer?an aristocratic tinge of neglect or public misunderstanding is a decided advantage, but Leavis is not about to admit a truly obscure outsider to his table—to whom all these adjectives apply becomes an "incomparable genius," and "a master of perfect expression...

...The keystone of his "style" is the use of italics: "For I think it is . . . Vronsky has his love . . . not Mrs...

...Oh, and also all American writers and critics who fail to understand that American literature is first of all a tributary, albeit a great one, of the broader river of English literature...

...As Leavis is "disgusted" by Lawrence's sex, so he is innocent of the complexity of Tolstoy's marriage views...

...The moral specificity of a work of art is instinctively ("unmistakably," "beyond question," "obviously," without end) and accurately determined at a glance, and the critic congratulates himself for opinions he expressed 20-30 years ago...

...make sure his tongue is well in cheek...

...I see an economy . . . acts on our imagination as a pregnant symbol...

...Leavis writes so badly that it would be generous to believe (I fear I can't) that Anna Karenina and Other Essays represents his Lady Chatterley's Lover, the decline and debacle of a once vigorous and impressive prose style and mentality...

...and Levin . . . compels our full respect...

...His abuse is directed mainly toward his betters: Eliot, Yeats, Pound, Fitzgerald, Forester, Flaubert, Joyce and Woolf, to mention just a few...

...Inevitably this delightful Laurel and Hardy team must collide, which they do hilariously in "with such pregnant economy," a figure of speech which is both concave and convex and so must cancel itself out...

...Leavis is one of the pillars of 20th century English criticism (I deviate slightly from the book's blurb), leader with his wife, familiarly known as Mrs...

...This is analogous to certain people, generally primitive, whose linguistic structures are simply incapable of accommodating various modern Western concepts...

...H. Lawrence] as a great writer, comparable to the 'great Europeans.' And he knows about [American literature], one is driven to say too, essentially nothing...

...Tolstoy's conviction was that marriage is a dubious refuge, and there is abundant evidence for this concern and viewpoint throughout the novel...

...In discussing Anna Karenina he reminds us...

...I enjoyed, as a respite from more obvious amusements, those sentences in which the placement of the adverb suggests archaic, almost Middle English...

...In "The Americanness of American Literature" we are given his condescension in a kernel: "America could not have produced a Lawrence...

...Eliot has never written better' (written italicized by way of insisting that it means something...

...Alas, Leavisism is also one of the most prevalent dispositions in the American university lecture-hall...

...All of these stresses occur on a single page, and the practice continues relentlessly to the end of the book, where one reads in disbelief Leavis' sneer at an assertion by Desmond MacCarthy: "'Mr...

...for the race, as it were.'" Finally, at the book's conclusion: ". . . and he wrote 'out of a deep moral sense—for the race, as it were.' " There are in excess of 50 such twitching verbal tapeworms in Anna Karenina and Other Essays...

...Who and what, one exclaims, is [Leavis] that he should take it on himself to pronounce on [the "great tradition"] in this way . . . How disastrously infelicitous are [his] generalizing preoccupations...

...It is in moving away from this old totemism of the critical spirit that the real work of modern criticism begins...

...Leavis say...

...It would be mean to suggest that Leavis does not function as a critic according to free will, but it does occur to me that his language would perhaps be functionally incapable of responding to the language of, say, Yeats...

...Leavis, of the "Cambridge critics" and editor of the much-esteemed critical journal Scrutiny (1932-1953...

...That last, of course, in contrast to those dabblers of perfect expression and masters of imperfect expression...

...Leavis, who has reason to distrust writers—they so often do the wrong thing and cause him difficulties and awkwardnesses—evidently has not pondered the possible application of this aphorism to criticism: Never trust the critic...

...there is nothing of the artist in him...

...As a critic Leavis is adept at resolving non-existent problems...

...At best his book] might be taken for a clear instance of the most indefensible didacticism...

...In England this grouping is widespread enough to have resulted in the present grave debility of literary criticism...

...The "great tradition" is a makeshift chain of modern writers anchored in the 18th century...

...The chain will break at the slightest tug (that horrid pubic hair had crept into D. H. Lawrence's art as early as 1920, and in this period too he was already—the shame of it—writing about "kicking away from the old womb of Europe"), and it is worth giving that tug because in its less apparent forms Lcavisism may now be in the process of parboiling American literature and slicing it into traditions and obsessive themes...

...Since Leavis often sees no further than his own pen nib, he is able to tell us in an essay on The Pilgrim's Progress: " 'Trust the tale,' as Lawrence said, not the writer," and then to give us another recension in his essay on Twain: " 'Never trust the artist...

...His favorite adjectives of praise are serious, intelligent, mature, moral...

...So firm and clear an economy . . . Pregnant reflections...

...Leavis]?there seems point in this for a final emphasis—is not a stylist...

...The appeal of an approach which demands that literature be rooted, relevant, and relucent is obvious enough...

...I will not dwell on [Leavis'] apparent indulgence . . . towards the estimate of [D...

...Levin commands Leavis' "full respect," but in the text Levin shows himself long incapable of accommodating a real partner in life, preferring instead an abstract "divine creature," modelled on a mother he never knew, whose sole purpose would be to provide him with a family...

...This aphorism is not Leavis' favorite, however...

...If 1 may be so uncouth as to capsulize his critical position, he has insisted upon a "great tradition" in literature which affirms life and the connection between life and literature...

...trust the criticism...

...But never fear, for Anna Karenina is a work of art...

...One should not rely overly on the taste and literary ability of a gatekeeper...

...It certainly demonstrates the pomposity of the man's style and viewpoint...

...This much we may learn from Anna Karenina and Other Essays: A concern with ranking and moral judgment in literature can, almost certainly does, bring down on one the curses of bad prose and foggy perception...

...F. R. Leavis as a critic suffers from the American vice of Puritanism, notable particularly in his total humorlessness and his barely suppressed envy...

...we must respond to that, what would Mrs...

...That statement might incline one to smile and note that England "could not" have produced a Mark Twain—might, I say, but for Leavis' unintentionally risible effort to put Mark Twain forward as the most "English" of American writers...

...I do not accuse Leavis alone, however, for it may be that he is merely an outstanding representative of a grave tradition...

...Leavis'] own critical naivete is extreme...

...I do not make these points with any happy complacency...

...This is great fun—the depression comes several hours after you put the volume down—but beneath it all is Leavis' profound disability to understand and react to literature...

...When a critic declares that his writer has written "two of the eight great masterpieces of the novel in this century...

...To this appeal is added the great reassurance of strict standards ("scrutiny"), so that the impure are hurled summarily down from Parnassus, or, as in the case of Lawrence, are purified before being permitted to enter...

...One additional example, my favorite, must suffice...

...Some of the other marked characteristics of Leavis' style may be observed in the opening paragraph of this essay, most notably his tendency toward clumsy Lati-nate impersonal and passive constructions...

...Or, "As for Vronsky, he is altogether unlike Lawrence...

...but nor will England be able to produce another...

...Then in an essay 28 pages later: " 'One writes,' D. H. Lawrence late in his life replied to a questioner, 'out of one's moral sense...

...Precisely...

...It is borne in on one how lamentably an industrious scholar . . . may be unaware of his own limitations and misconceive his place in the scheme of things...

...It is an essential difference...

...Many fine writers in that chain need liberation...

...The reality behind Anna Karenina and Other Essays—and Leavis' entire career —is a fear of his century and ultimately of literature itself...

...The foregoing pastiche, assembled from F. R. Leavis' new collection of old introductions, book reviews and talks (Anna Karenina and Other Essays, Pantheon, 248 pp., $5.95) is, I think, a fair if somewhat harshly put estimate of his own character and importance among modern critics...

...Levin is not a great novelist...

...Tolstoy's essential problems," he writes, "moral and spiritual, are ours...

...Two words for which Leavis has a clear weakness are pregnant and economy...

...trust the tale': Lawrence's dictum might have been addressed to Mark Twain's case...

...In his essay on Tolstoy he cites Lawrence again: "One writes out of one's moral sense...

...O come...

...It may be a great tradition that he seeks to guard and identify, but his own coarseness in referring to "the Audens, Yeatses, and Eliots" gives little assurance that there is any moral benefit in it...

...It will be an economy at this point . . . How pregnant, and right...