(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:
