F. R. Leavis and the Grating Tradition
BELL, PEARL K.
Writers & Writing F.R. LEAVIS AND THE GRATING TRADITION BY PEARL K. BELL A At the age of 80 F. R. Leavis, England's most contentious literary critic for more than half a century, remains bloody...
...As a result, he has been mortally lacking in the tolerance for ambiguity that Keats called Negative Capability...
...Leavis has spent all of his very long life in Cambridge being too much a teacher and critic...
...Like D. H. Lawrence, his King Charles's Head, Leavis seeks to enact a mystic transformation through words, through feverish incantation of the sacred liturgy of Life...
...It enables a man to remain "content with half-knowledge to make up one's mind about nothing...
...On the contrary, Leavis claims, it is far less useful to intellectual development than the English masterpieces he deems worthy of the name...
...for humanity...
...Only in the past does he discover those major writers who have been the innovators and guardians of thought...
...His letter drew fire from Noel Annan, who charged the critic with grossly distorting the Cambridge Establishment's treatment of him in the '30s...
...Moreover, his case against linguistic philosophy is hardly strengthened by the tiresome rehearsal, yet again, of ancient grievances against Cambridge enemies...
...Leavis' notorious belligerence is fully on display in his new book, The Living Principle: "English" as a Discipline of Thought (Oxford, 264 pp., $12.95), though in fact a large part of the book is not new: Three of the essays were published in Leavis' magazine, Scrutiny, over 30 years ago...
...Leavis judges Eliot's contention that "human kind/Cannot bear very much reality" a sin against life, against language, against culture itself...
...and he himself, writing in The Great Tradition of his distaste for the late novels of Henry James, suggests one reason for his failures of mind and heart...
...And the sacerdotal function of the critic-teacher is to keep "an educated body of taste and opinion alive to the age" by judging, with severely demanding rigor, whether specific poets and novelists have attained those indispensable perfections of word and thought—maturity, seriousness and responsibility—that inform and quicken the highest achievements of creative intelligence...
...Language is revelation, for "livingness in human life is manifest in language—manifest to those whose thought about language is, inseparably, thought about literary creation...
...or by the cheap shots against personal anathemas like America, the BBC, Auden, Amis, Joyce, Balzac, ad nauseum...
...being a novelist came to be too large a part of his living...
...that is, he did not live enough...
...But no matter, for the volume appears to be his long-overdue Summa Theologica of his religion of literature...
...This figure hardly accords with Leavis' moral exaltation of "maturity," "responsibility" and "spiritual health.' Nor can we reconcile Leavis' precept that "life is growth and growth change, and the condition of these is continuity" with his spiteful dogmatism...
...His love-hate feelings toward Eliot have fluctuated between "indebtedness" and "betrayal" over the years, and the animosity is by no means impersonal...
...But in the opening chapter of The Living Principle, entitled "Thought, Language and Objectivity," Leavis attacks a newly dangerous heresy in our corrupt modern world...
...But such neutrality would be incongruent with Leavis' lofty moral seriousness, his idiosynoratically obsessive devotion to literature, and this seriousness is the key to his formidable influence on generations of students (unforgettably described by Norman Podhoretz in Making It...
...James, he remarks, "suffered from being too much a professional novelist...
...or by quoting for the umpteenth time that beloved passage from Lady Chatterley's Lover about the ugliness of industrial towns where "the living intuitive faculty was dead as nails...
...Unfortunately, Leavis is neither a systematic thinker nor an eloquent or notably lucid writer...
...As the champion of the D. H. Lawrence who affirmed the wondrous possibilities and fullness of life, he takes no account of the Lawrence who raved of blood-consciousness and sought the violent destruction of society...
...Within his narrow academic fastness, made even narrower by his devouring animus, he has been the undisputed master of his undergraduate dominion, where the range of life, at least in Lawrence's sense, is not large enough...
...The more one reads Leavis, the more irritating his eccentricities and discrepancies become...
...Because Eliot was "lamentably" unable to escape his "peculiar personal 'waste land,'" he was crippled by spiritual contradictions, and rendered "incapable of cogent or coherent thought...
...These tenets are of course scarcely unfamiliar, since Leavis has been pounding the credo at students and readers with unyielding tenacity and dedication since his youth...
...As the hanging judge of countless writers, he finds the intransigent language of destructive censure more agreeable than the accents of celebration, and contemptuously dismisses all the novels written since Lawrence's death (in 1930) and any contemporary poet born after Eliot...
...Critical reading is an intensely passionate response of Leavis' entire being, one so vital and compelling that it must never be taken as anything less than a matter of life and death...
...To someone of Leavis' temperament, such indecisive receptivity would of course be tantamount to moral chaos, yet the loss has been his own...
...Back came another volley from Leavis, and in return Annan fired off a long and admirably calm rebuttal in which he lost his cool just once: "Dr...
...Leavis sneers at me for pretending to be 'fair.' Let him rise up early and He down late, he will never have the faintest notion of the meaning of that word...
...The English language, he declares with unregenerate insularity, "in its incomparable literature," is nothing less than the "living continuity [that] takes the individual human being, the particularizing actuality of life, back to the dawn of consciousness and beyond...
...That Leavis' poison may be another man's mead is to him only an additional symptom of "our cultural plight...
...Against Wittgenstein and his followers, he maintains that "the intelligent study of creative literature entails the study of language in its fullest use, the conceptual implications of the word 'linguistic' as used in general by philosophers being disastrously misleading...
...Needless to say, this crudely Lawrentian impeachment is not as disinterested as Leavis would have us believe...
...Thus only strict and meticulous training in literary criticism will enable the university to fulfill its vital function of sustaining "an informed and cultivated public...
...The Four Quartets, Leavis believes, is an expense of genius in a waste of nihilism...
...With this intractable moral certainty, Leavis devotes almost half of his book to a provocative dissection of T. S. Eliot's Four Quartets, in order to demonstrate that Eliot is an unquestionable master of language whose thought and values are "unacceptable...
...The paper had quoted Hayman on the bellicose octogenarian's talent for making enemies, and Leavis promptly accused it of "falsifying irresponsibility...
...In Leavis, the prophet is balanced, in the practical world of the classroom, by the working critic, whose commitment to the close-reading method of poetic analysis—pulling a poem or novel apart with indefatigable persistence and patience, to determine the impulse that compelled the writer's imagination—is superficially indistinguishable from the morally detached esthetics of the New Criticism...
...If this is perhaps more than one can reasonably ask of criticism, Leavis might reply that reason is simply not adequate to the task, for a major writer requires an exceptionally heightened "awareness of the possibilities of life," as well as the means of expression that must embody such awareness...
...It is the notion, which he blames on Wittgenstein, that linguistic philosophy is a more valuable field of study for university students than English literature...
...The mystical and oracular power of literature, for Leavis, is derived from the heuristic quaEty of language, that uniquely human instrument of discovery and persuasion...
...The meaning of his "fresh approach to fundamentals" is consistently obscured by his densely matted prose and undermined by what John Gross has wittily described as his "frequent air of having triumphantly demonstrated what has merely been strenuously asserted...
...What is more intellectually disturbing is Leavis' indefensible gift for disregarding what may prove inconvenient...
...He is repelled by the poet's "fear of life and contempt...
...LEAVIS AND THE GRATING TRADITION BY PEARL K. BELL A At the age of 80 F. R. Leavis, England's most contentious literary critic for more than half a century, remains bloody but unbowed...
...Indeed, it is painfully consistent with his stormy career as writer and teacher (at Downing College, Cambridge) that a deferential essay by Ronald Hayman in a recent New Review, in honor of his birthday, has led to an acrimonious row in the letters column of the Times Literary Supplement...
...What impressionable undergraduate, at least before the '60s, could resist so urgently seductive a vision of literary significance...
Vol. 59 • February 1976 • No. 4
