A single sheet of folded, faded, yellow
paper; a page of inexpertly typed text, the last line scored through in ink; a
scribbled sentence underneath, with a signature and date. This is one of my
most precious pieces of personal memorabilia. I had lost sight of it long ago,
but now it has come to hand again, retrieved after many years from the pages of
a book into which I had tucked it. Here, word for word, is what is written on
that yellow paper:
WHEN PROFESSOR F.R. LEAVIS gave a lecture
to the English Society at Newcastle upon Tyne on January 30th, he
prefaced his talk with a call for universities to re-establish and cultivate a
responsible and educated public. He said that universities must strive to
become ‘anti-academic’ in order to regain their status as true creative centres
of civilization.
However, Professor Leavis stressed that he
was not optimistic of the future: ‘Don’t regard me as an optimist,’ he said, ‘I
have spent my life in a university.’ Questioned at the end of the lecture, he
returned to this theme: ‘The battle will never be won, but it shan’t be lost
while I’m alive.’
Professor Leavis, probably the most
influential and controversial literary critic of the 20th century,
was speaking on ‘Eliot and Lawrence on Hamlet’. Describing Eliot and Lawrence as the last
writers of major creativity this century, Professor Leavis qualified this by
saying that Eliot’s criticism was weakest where he needed to make a serious
self-committal. Lawrence, on the other hand, approached his criticism, and that
of Hamlet in particular, with a
novelist’s sensibility: ‘Lawrence,’ he said, ‘was only marginally a critic, but
his margin was so wide.’
Speaking to Palatinate before the lecture, Professor Leavis said that he had by
no means retired from academic life. In addition to his work at York
University, where he is Visiting Professor, and numerous engagements which take
him all over the country, he is still busy writing. Lectures in America, his most recent book, has just been published
and May will see the publication of his Clarke Lectures, given in Cambridge. He
is at present collaborating with his wife on a book on Charles Dickens, which
he hopes will be ready in time for the Dickens centenary. ‘I hope it will
appear before the others,’ he added.
Professor Leavis would not comment on the
academic life of Cambridge to-day. Although he has lived nearly all his life
there, he claims, ‘I am an outsider in Cambridge now – I have never really
belonged there. But my wife and I feel we are Cambridge, in spite of Cambridge.
In our family,’ he concluded, ‘we go on until we are killed on the roads.’
I wish you’d leave this last
sentence out. I don’t want to disturb my wife gratuitously.
FR
Leavis
Feb-3.
I wrote this for the Durham University
student newspaper in 1969. I had joined Palatinate as a fresher, spending
my first term reviewing student drama productions before graduating to
interview the aspiring founder of a new literary journal. Loftily, this
would-be Cyril Connolly – I don’t think the journal ever got off the ground -
had told me, ‘We aim to become Durham’s Encounter.
We shan’t be like Scrutiny: we don’t
intend to wash our intellectual dirty linen in public.’ I included this line in
my report; but, back in the Palatinate office and typing up my report, I
admitted I’d never heard of Scrutiny.
‘You must have done! It’s Leavis’s journal!’ exclaimed my editor, a bearded
third-year Eng. Lit. student of whom I was both nervous and in awe. I didn’t
dare admit I’d never heard of Leavis either.
I would soon find out. Discovering that
Leavis was due to speak at Newcastle in the New Year, my editor sent me to
report on the lecture – ‘And try and get an interview with him, while you’re
there,’ he added. Looking back now from a great distance at my
nineteen-year-old-self, I’m impressed I had the courage to speak to Leavis at
all. But I did, and he was willing to be interviewed - on condition I let him
vet my article before it was published. Hence the draft on yellow paper, which
I typed up as soon as I got back to Durham, posted to Bulstrode Gardens,
Cambridge, and received back almost by return.
My editor was impressed. ‘Keep that,’ he said, handing the yellow page back
to me, ‘it may be worth something one day.’ And so it is, to me at any rate.
Re-reading it now, I’m struck by the number
of times I refer to Leavis as ‘Professor’. He was never a Professor at
Cambridge – indeed his lack of promotion was not the least of his grievances
against the University. In the same year that I met him, he would note bitterly
that he had only ‘attained to an Assistant Lectureship in my forties and a full
lectureship ten years later, and was made a Reader in my sixty-fifth year.’*
But I knew that he had just been appointed Visiting Professor at York, and so I
sought advice from my own Professor at Durham (T.S. Dorsch, a debonair editor
of Shakespeare, never without a cigarette holder and his own silver ashtray; he
represented, I suspect, everything Leavis most disliked about the English
establishment). Dorsch
said to me, ‘I’m sure he’d love to be called Professor: you’d be his friend for
life!’
I’m
struck, too, by my last sentence, the one Leavis asked me to omit. I remember
being pleased he’d fed me such a good line to end with, and disappointed he
wanted me to excise it. But his comment was truer than I knew - and probably
than he’d intended: not until many years afterwards did I discover that Leavis’s
own father had died following a road accident, on the very day of his son’s
last finals paper. I doubt now whether not wanting to offend his wife had had
anything to do with it. (To be continued.)
Adrian
Barlow
*This
comment appears in the Introduction to Leavis’s Clark Lectures, English Literature in our time and the
University (1969), p.22.
[illustration: Leavis’s comment and
signature at the end of the document discussed above.
I have written about F.R. Leavis before:
Read the continuation of this post:
Text
and illustration © Adrian Barlow
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