Fifty Shades of English Lit.

Early on in Sam Taylor-Johnson’s film Fifty Shades of Grey, Christian Grey (strictly Christian – no one dares to call him Chris) asks Anastasia Steele what turned her on to English Literature: Jane Austen, the Brontë novels or Thomas Hardy. Ana (always Ana to her friends) pauses only for a moment before answering, ‘Thomas Hardy’. ‘Strange,’ says Christian, ‘I had you down for Jane Austen.’

Fifty Shades is a film in which many questions are asked – of the audience as much as of the characters. It begins with Ana, an Eng. Lit. senior at university in Vancouver, going to interview the implausibly young, successful and well-heeled Christian Grey for a student newspaper. ‘Why do you keep biting your lip?’ he enquires as she struggles to put to him any questions worth asking. There’s quite a bit of lip biting later on. Later on, too, he will ask her, ‘Are you a romantic?’ She is surprised by the question, but replies, ‘Me a romantic? Well I’ve just graduated in English Literature – so yes, I guess I must be a romantic.’

I’m interested by the assumptions behind these questions, and by the answers given to them. Two of the three novelists Christian lists – all from the 19^th century, as if this is where the heart of English Literature is located – are women. In the UK now, more than two out of three students (71% at the latest count, data from the GCE Inter-Board Statistics 2013, published by Pearson) taking A level English Literature are women, and almost the same proportion of A* and A grades in the subject are achieved by women. This is having an increasing effect on the ratio of male and female applicants to read English (still the most popular Humanities subject) at university. Year by year English Departments are producing fewer and fewer male graduates. Consequently, the number of men training to teach English in schools continues to shrink, and neither in secondary nor in higher education has the profession begun to come to terms with the implications of this.

It changes the way the subject is approached in class. I spent an interesting morning last month with a group of A level students who were studying Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Sylvia Plath’s Ariel poems and Caryl Churchill’s play Top Girls. These three texts, all by women, were their coursework, and they had to find ways of comparing them. One starting point they had been given by their teacher was this, from Plath’s poem, ‘Daddy’:

Every woman adores a Fascist,

The boot in the face, the brute

Brute heart of a brute like you.

I had been asked to talk about how context affects our understanding of these three texts, both studied individually and as a group. Still at school myself when Sylvia Plath committed suicide in 1963, I thought it might be revealing to compare Plath’s lines from ‘Daddy’ with the ways in which both she and Ted Hughes recalled their first meeting – she in her private journal immediately after the event and he in Birthday Letters, published thirty-five years later.

Plath’s Journal entries were more than late-night jottings: they were carefully crafted exercises undertaken by a young writer, at this stage inclined to imagine herself as a novelist rather than a poet. She and Hughes, by this time both graduates in English Literature, met for the first time at a party in Cambridge in a now long-demolished alley, Falcon Yard, off Petty Curry. Here is her first sight of him:

Then the worst happened, that big, dark, hunky boy, the only one there huge enough for me … came over and was looking hard in my eyes and it was Ted Hughes.  (26 February 1956)

No shortage of bobbysoxer excitement here, though ‘Then the worst happened’ is a disturbingly proleptic verdict on a romance that hadn’t even begun. Plath admits in her journal that she’d been drinking heavily before she saw Hughes; even so, what happened next comes as a shock:

and then he kissed me bang smash on the mouth and ripped my hairband off, my lovely red hairband scarf which has weathered the sun and much love [….] And when he kissed my neck I bit him long and hard on the cheek, and when we came out of the room, blood was running down his face [….] Such violence, and I can see how women lie down for artists.

Violence and submission:  the students with whom I was working were anxious to justify Sylvia Plath’s status as a second-wave feminist, but I think her admission – ‘I can see how women lie down for artists’ – troubled some of them, especially when set alongside the lines from ‘Daddy’.  So I suggested we should compare Ted Hughes’s recollection of the same fatal evening in his poem ‘St. Botolph’s’. Hughes looks back on it with a mixture of astonishment and regret. Recapturing his first ‘snapshot’ of Plath – ‘Taller / Than ever you were again’  – he says

I see you there, clearer, more real

Than in any of the years in its shadow –

As if I saw you that once, then never again ….

He goes on to claim he remembers little about the evening itself, that afterwards he was ‘stupefied’ to find her headscarf (which he remembers as blue, not red) in his pocket. But that wasn’t the only trophy he carried away from his first encounter with Plath: he also had

    the swelling ring-moat of tooth-mark
That was to brand my face for the next month.

    The me beneath it for good.

If Hughes, I tried to explain to the students, had found himself in a sense ‘beneath’ the ring-moat Plath had imprinted on his cheek, then in that same sense he was already a drowned man – drowned ‘for good’, with all the ambiguity that phrase implies. 

I’m not sure I convinced them. But perhaps Ana would have understood what Ted Hughes meant, and what Sylvia Plath had meant too. After all, like them, she was a romantic: and like them, she’d graduated in English Lit.

Adrian Barlow

Extracts from the Journals of Sylvia Plath (Karen V. Kukil ed.; London: Faber and Faber, 2000) pp.211-212

Extracts from ‘St. Botolph’s’ in Ted Hughes, Birthday Letters (London: Faber and Faber, 1998) p.14.

On F.R. Leavis (ii): a close shave

(The following discussion is a continuation of my previous post, On F.R. Leavis (i): Dangerous Driving.)

Ray’s Barber Shop in All Saints Passage used to be a Cambridge institution. I only went there once, but Ray greeted me cheerfully and, after chatting for a few minutes, suddenly said, ‘I believe, Sir, you may be an English teacher.’ Disconcerted, I admitted this was true. ‘Don’t worry,’ said Ray, ‘I can always tell. Lots of English teachers come to me. Can you guess my most famous teacher? Dr Leavis himself!’ Ray waited to see how I would react to this news, before continuing, ‘Yes, he always came here. You’re sitting in the very chair he sat in. And this, Sir,’ he added, suddenly brandishing an ancient barber’s cut-throat, ‘is the very razor which I shaved him with!’

Leavis was himself a Cambridge institution. As Clive James wrote in Always Unreliable,  ‘He was part of the landscape. You became accustomed to seeing him walk briskly along Trinity Street, gown blown out horizontal in his slipstream. He looked as if walking briskly was something he had practised in a wind-tunnel.’ He was usually tieless, in an age when open-necked shirts were frowned upon, unless you were wearing a cravat. He had grown up in Cambridge, gone to school and university there, and spent virtually his whole life teaching at Downing. So why had he said, when I interviewed him, that he was ‘an outsider in Cambridge now’ and that he had ‘never really belonged there’?

Biographers and critics have often suggested that Leavis saw himself as an exile; and if an exile is someone who has to leave his native home (voluntarily or otherwise) because he cannot in conscience reconcile himself to the prevailing climate – political, cultural, religious etc. - this seems to me to describe Leavis’s position precisely. He was simply never comfortable with Cambridge University and its English Faculty, or the literary establishment at large.  His stance was always oppositional, though he believed that the business of criticism was, in one of his favourite phrases (borrowed, with acknowledgement, from TS Eliot), ‘the common pursuit of true judgment’:

‘ "The common pursuit of true judgment": that is how the critic should see his business, and what it should be for him. His perceptions and judgments are his, or they are nothing; but whether or not he has consciously addressed himself to co-operative labour, they are inevitably collaborative. Collaboration may take the form of disagreement, and one is grateful to the critic whom one has found worth disagreeing with.’ (The Common Pursuit, Preface)

‘Collaboration may take the form of disagreement’: this is the key to Leavis’s dialectical method. He came to believe that the essence of Cambridge lay in a willingness to say ‘Yes, but …’, questioning everything as a way of challenging intellectual complacency. This complacency was for him the cardinal sin into which British academic life had strayed, and outside academia he also found it everywhere embodied by England’s literary establishment: the BBC, the newspapers, and professional bodies such as (I’m sorry to have to say) the English Association (EA). He greatly admired Henry James for turning down, in 1912, an invitation to become chairman of the EA. Reading Leavis’s account of this in Scrutiny, (vol. XIV, 1946) you can hear him cheering James on when the novelist replies to the Association, ‘I am a mere stony, ugly monster of Dissociation and Detachment’.  This was Leavis, too.

As often happens with exiles, Leavis acquired a certain glamour among those who admired his principles and shared his contempts. I suspect he played up to this a little; at least it enabled him to claim of himself, his wife Q.D. Leavis and their collaborators on Scrutiny, that ‘We were – and we knew we were – Cambridge – the essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge’. He even had a definition of what ‘we’ meant in this context: in an Appendix to his Clark Lectures, delivered in 1967 and published two years later as English Literature in our time and the University, Leavis described ‘we’ as ‘a suitably indeterminate word, suggesting as it does the unofficial, informal and non-authoritative’. And true it is that this unofficial group of exiles (‘No pupil of mine was ever appointed to a post in the Cambridge English Faculty’ he once claimed with a combination of outrage and satisfaction) came to exemplify an approach to English that teachers, sixth-form pupils and university students would learn to think of as Cambridge English.

I have to admit that, rather than Leavis’s own best-known texts (The Great Tradition, Revaluations, et al.), it was books such as L.C. Knights’ Explorations (1946) and, from a generation later, David Holbrook’s English for Maturity (1961) which gave me a keener sense of what the study of English Literature could be; of why close reading is a creative and ‘re-creative’ as well as critical activity, and of why teaching literature is an important vocation. But these convictions had first been articulated by Leavis and, long after he had sat to be shaved for the last time in Ray’s Barber Shop, they continued to animate some of the best English teaching in schools and HE departments. Do they still?

It has always been my instinct to distrust people as aggressively confident of their own opinions as Leavis was; and many of his dismissive judgments about writers seem to me at odds with the idea of a common (i.e. collaborative) pursuit of true judgment.  Here, though, I must pause and reply ‘Yes, but…’ to my own judgment, for I want at least to say, unambiguously, that Leavis’s conception of English as ‘a discipline of thought’ should still resonate wherever the teaching of English is taken seriously. It’s time, too, to acknowledge that Leavis was the first academic in England to recognize Eliot and Lawrence as writers of ‘major creativity’ whom English studies could not ignore if English was to be taken seriously. Who else of his generation could have written New Bearings in English Poetry? It was published in 1932, the same year his wife, Q.D. Leavis, published Fiction and the Reading Public?  1932 was also the year in which together they launched Scrutiny. From then until his death he believed – as he made clear in the lecture I attended as a naïve undergraduate – ‘that universities must strive to become ‘anti-academic’ in order to regain their status as true creative centres of civilization’. By anti-academic he meant outward-facing, not inward-looking; self-critical, not complacent.  He insisted, above all, that you cannot be really thoughtful about literature if you are not, at the same time, thoughtful about life. I am surprised, but glad, that it has taken the rediscovery of my interview with him so long ago to make me, at last, say plainly why I think he still matters so much.

Adrian Barlow

I have written about F.R. Leavis before:

World and time: new bearings on FR Leavis

What is, and was, Cambridge English?

            On F.R. Leavis (1): dangerous driving