oftwominds.com Readers Journal-Icons of my youth: Frank Leavis

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	Icons of my youth: Frank Leavis (Protagoras, July 10, 2007) Who was he? What was his agenda? Does he still matter, and why? He was born in 1895 and died in 1978, having lived almost all of his life in Cambridge, England. He was a stretcher bearer in the First War, and was gassed; the experience marked him for life, though he never alludes to it in his critical writings. He was married to Queenie, Q D Leavis, now even less read than him, but her two volumes, Fiction and the Reading Public, are in the same humane tradition, and as good as anything he wrote himself. He was probably the best known literary critic in England of the mid third of the twentieth century, and remained controversial to the end of his life. If you were at school or college in England in the fifties, and reading literature seriously, you inevitably came on Frank Leavis, and he inevitably had a powerful effect on you. What made him remarkable is something that still does: he was interested only in one thing, what was good and what was bad. And he believed that goodness or badness was an objective quality of the works he studied. When Leavis first wrote there was a general sentiment, as there is now, though arising for very different reasons, that all literature was more or less the same in value. There were of course the classics, which were 'well loved', and they included Spenser, Milton, Fielding, Shakespeare, Dickens, Trollope, Tennyson, George Eliot, Kipling...and so on. These had become by tradition part of the canon in a way that popular fiction was not, but what was and what was not part of the canon was not debateable. It was known by the right people instinctively. The study of literature, as opposed to what was read, was textual. The study of the Anglo Saxon texts took up a large part of the syllabus. The Belle Lettrist tradition was alive and well, and reflected what was read. You can read it with baffled incredulity today in the essays of Q (Sir Arthur Quiller Couch). Robert Bridges, the Poet Laureate, embodied it in poetry. "Beauty is truth, truth beauty" was something that would have commanded assent, if not understanding. In this atmosphere it is apocryphally said of Leavis that one of his teachers at Cambridge once said to him in gentle puzzlement, "Mr Leavis, it appears that you prefer some authors to others". How odd. What was odder still was that he not only preferred them, he thought them better. To give an idea of what he was reacting against, we may recall F L Lucas' comment on For Lancelot Andrewes. "...a pleasant little volume written by a man who is evidently fond of reading". The tone typifies what was then common: a well bred refusal to think seriously about literature, while insisting on writing about it, and in private, finding Dorothy Sayers amusing and intelligent. Leavis was only interested in textual analysis and historical study and interpretation as a means to discrimination of quality. He believed that some authors, some writings, were objectively and absolutely better than others, and that the ability to discriminate, which was more than taste, but something like knowing the difference between right and wrong, could be taught. Sincere people could differ, but in discussion they would come to understand that one point of view was correct. It was objective, but it wasn't objective like the temperature or pressure of a gas, subject to measurement which would stop debate. But it was still objective. Just as he found the Belle Lettrist tradition, and its exponents in the British Establishment, both incomprehensible and distasteful, so he would have found today's post modernism, structuralism, deconstruction and so on futile and empty - and plain wrong. For Leavis, a poem or novel might be the expression of an author. It might have its origins in the author's situation, his social circumstances, his culture. That was however irrelevant to its value. What counted about it was whether it embodied serious intelligent thought about the aspect of the human condition and experience which it covered. It had a real meaning, independent of our perhaps mistaken or partial reactions to it. To get to this judgment required close reading and lots of thought. He had no time at all for the concept of poetry as something giving one a vague sense of exaltation. The early Yeats, dreaming of Oisin, Swinburne's chanted melodies, all that was either useless or nonsense. For him, Yeats starts with Sailing to Byzantium. 'I will arise and go now' is at best a part of a long apprenticeship. 'A banner with a strange device: Excelsior!" What on earth was that about? Dylan Thomas came to embody all that he despised in this tradition. Here we had a poet, sponsored by the cultural establishment for export, spouting in a fake establishment accent what to Leavis was literally nonsense, writings with no literal meaning that he could determine, while ostentatiously drinking himself to death. You can find a locus classicus of this approach to Thomas in an essay by one of Leavis' contributors, in Selections from Scrutiny. A. E. Houseman's lecture On the Name and Nature of Poetry was a particular object of scorn for Leavis' school. He knew when some lines were poetry, said Houseman, because they made his hair prickle. The reaction was instinctive. For Leavis, the reaction needed to be felt, but also thought. One was to be moved, certainly, but moved by the meaning. He also had no time for what he thought was the merely smart. Auden, and the British Council, came to stand in for everything he hated about this. The early Auden had promise. The later Auden had failed to realise it. He had been corrupted by the uncritical admiration of a coterie. The early Eliot had been acclaimed. The later Eliot, admired by that same coterie, had degenerated into an admirer of Kipling, the author of Murder in the Cathedral, and someone who wrote disparagingly of Lawrence (in French no less) that his characters rushed off into the wilds and there abandoned all the refinements which civilisation had invented in order to make sexual love bearable. With this remark, Eliot joined Flaubert who had, in Lawrence's phrase, 'stood off from life as if from leprosy'. Distaste, rather than reverence, for the human life of the body and feeling was for him one of the mortal sins. Nevertheless, Four Quartets was highly praised when it came out. But the Anglo Catholic Eliot of Faber and Faber was held to be a different animal from the poet. Trust the poem, not the poet. You can see from these examples that this is not so much what we now think of as literary criticism as it is moral criticism. The question being addressed is not what this work means, where it came from. The question is: does this work, as an approach to the human condition, strike us, on careful reflection, as one we can approve of? You can also see that Leavis was like all moralists, a good hater, as well as a powerful advocate of what he approved of. You can see he had something in common with that other now neglected figure, Yvor Winters. And finally, you can see how he came to believe that the role of this sort of study in education went far beyond appreciation and understanding of literature. It was, he felt, essentially about teaching people how to think about life. It was to be a true Sentimental, that is a moral, Education. How did it work? The test for a critic of this kind is how his judgments are seen to have stood up over time. Winters' admiration for Bridges, for example, seems totally incomprehensible now. Well, it was fairly odd when he wrote it. Leavis had two phases in his career, and they are sharply different. The first phase would include New Bearings in English Poetry, Revaluation, some of the essays which were reprinted in the Common Pursuit. The Great Tradition comes at the end of this phase. In this phase, his touch seemed assured, his judgments subtle. He can point to exactly the passage or episode which will illustrate his argument, and its so perfectly apt that you simply agree. His discriminations are delicate. He rarely condemns out of hand, and when he does, you agree. But for the most part he is placing things where they belong. Take for example the classic essay on Forster in The Common Pursuit. He admires, he appreciates. He sympathizes with The Longest Journey. He makes two qualifying points however, which when you have taken them on board, will form your view of Forster from then on. The first is his remark that at times the Schlegels and the Wilcoxes seem oddly similar in certain attitudes. He says this, commenting on an outburst of patriotic affection for the English landscape. Yes, you say, after thinking hard about this. He is on to something, and it goes very deep. How deep it goes is, how different can they be - members of the same class, governing the same Empire, drawing income from the same business activities? What then does this tell us about the sensibility that thinks them so different? The second is his remark on the dismissal of Ronny in A Passage to India. He quotes the throw-away line "his religion was of the stale public school kind, that never goes bad, even in the tropics", and points to it as an example of a characteristic, though infrequent, failure of tone. It is correct, and once again he is onto something fundamental. What he has seen is that the moral judgment in Forster is often perilously close to the exercise of taste, and threatens to become no more than the fashion of a coterie. It is not often, and certainly not always, like that. But the threat is there. He does not say, as Winters might have, that there is a background and reason for this. Forster is at the end of a tradition, in which we moved from moral authority and conscience as the voice of God through the Church, to its being the voice of God directly communicating to me, to its being the voice of morality without God, to its being what I feel like now. And so we end up with the command of the sixties: if it feels good, do it. In Forster we are just leaving the voice of morality, but still, most of the time, in that world and with that authority. That is what gives Forster so much of his appeal - he is writing about what is sensed as being right and wrong and profoundly important in human relations, and doing so in terms of our immediate feelings and intuitions rather than our apprehension of our duties. But if anything one has more respect and admiration for Leavis because he does not come at the matter from this structured background. He is like a barometer, he registers precisely that something has gone wrong, and knows exactly what it is, without being terribly interested in how society evolved to be able to product this precise kind of wrongness. On the whole, as we read Revaluation, we find ourselves agreeing with the judgments. Yes, Milton is interminable. Yes, Dr Johnson was right - our language sunk under him. Yes, the tradition that goes from Sidney, Spenser through Milton to Tennyson is minor. Yes, 'if Pope is not a poet, where is poetry to be found'. Yes, Shelley is the start of the tradition of incoherent exaltation and rhetoric that ends in Swinburne, and is simply confusion. You cannot make any sense of the Ode to the West Wind. And yes, the late Vision of Judgment is in a different league. The second Hyperion is indeed remarkable. It is not that there is nothing to disagree with. Wordsworth is perhaps seriously over- estimated. But the landscape of what is real quality, and what is dross, is clearly marked, and after one has seen it drawn this way, it cannot be redrawn. Something similar happens with the Great Tradition. Trollope, the favourite of English politicians, is essentially entertainment. The serious novelist to compare with Tolstoy is indeed George Eliot - and he puts his finger, as you would expect, spot on the weakness of Will, without letting it figure too largely in his account. His account of Daniel Deronda will be unquestioned once read. This is Leavis at his finest. He can read this long novel, which is one part utterly dead and tedious, and one part terse, brilliant, and without equal in English. He can see both, and judge both fairly. His account of Hard Times is also perfect. On Conrad he convinces. But as we will comment later, he perhaps convinces without citing any very precise evidence, in ways that, when he does the same thing with James, are felt to fail. Unfortunately, as Leavis grew older, he became more dogmatic and more embattled, more strident and less subtle in his discriminations. There are traces of this in the earlier work but the full scale of the growing disaster becomes apparent in his treatment of Lawrence. Part of the responsibility lies in the hostility of the British establishment. Part lies in his reaction to it. Part lies with his followers who had the enthusiasm of converts. A larger part lies with his concept of the agenda and how he came to implement it. The difficulty was, what you did when you had gone through the literature of your native language and established the canon. Leavis' project was essentially one of classification, though, as we will discuss in a moment, what was pinned to it as an educational policy was something much more weighty. Once you had done the classification, there was little more to do except to insist on it, and to go into ever more detail on the tree. The glory days were over. There was also a tendency not to justify one's choices, but simply to announce them. We can see this in some of the increasingly puzzling judgments of his later years. InThe Great Tradition, for instance, he opens the chapter on James by quoting at length the start of the Portrait of a Lady. With no close textual analysis or reading, this is being asserted to be prose by a master. But as you read and re-read the passage, this is a judgment which in detail may be supportable, but will strike you as in rather desperate need of a kind of support which it doesn't get. Still later, the thing happens in extreme form in his writings on Lawrence. We find passages of the most awful, incoherent, overwrought prose lying on the page in extended quotations as unquestionable evidence of greatness. People used to feel that Leavis had been led astray by the cult of Lawrence. This isn't right. It was rather that the method, or rather, the method as he fell away from it in later life, was inevitably going to lead to admiration for the unworthy, and Lawrence was simply the case that presented itself. Lawrence was not what Leavis thought he was or wanted him to be. The writings are not what Leavis made of them. But there were some aspects of Lawrence that, if you abandonned close reading, you could construe as in line with Leavis' approach to morality. This was the point at which Leavis had come to trust what he wanted the teller to be, rather than trust the tale as it was. This part of the agenda then was a partial success. A much greater one earlier than later, and a much greater one when the agenda had been accompanied by openness to discussion and close reading. The educational agenda was a different matter, and now seems to have been a failure. He seems to have believed that through the teaching of what he called 'English' one could teach a morality of liberal values which would have been essentially apolitical. The agenda reminds one irresistibly of the Bloomsbury ethos which he so despised. It was a concept of morality in which 'personal relations' were central. I don't mean to deny their importance. That we should treat each other as ends in themselves and not means is one of the critical insights of the Christian tradition. It is just that you do best to learn and teach this directly by talking about it, not by reading fiction and poetry. The flow is two way - but is largely the other way. It is morality that helps you judge literature, rather than the other way round. The practice of education along these lines by one of his prominent students made one uneasy in a different way. There was a temptation to take the writings and first efforts of criticism of the very young as testimony to their states of unconscious feelings, which were after all morally weighted, and to feel that it was the business of the teacher to encourage or discourage the direction they were going in. This was implicit in the notion of the teaching of reading as moral education. It led to some very strange places. Surely, one felt, reading these accounts, we were teaching literature. Surely we were not required to meddle with the real or imaginary intimate feelings of the very young? Was it really an appropriate reaction in an adult, to the first creative efforts of a boy, to view with admiration his identifcation of himself with a motorcycle, itself very much an interpretation of a semi literate sequence of free verse lines, as an praiseworthy expression of his awakening masculinity? There's a danger in becoming too interested in certain of the child's responses, particularly those intimately connected to awakening masculinity, and too little in his thoughts. The objective had in a curious way become subjective, and the interest threatened to become intrusive. The effort also relied on a concept of ethical reasoning where it did not have to be applied to the big, broadly political and social questions - poverty, the organisation of society, freedom and democracy, terrorism and national aspiration. As for Bloomsbury, the effort assumed an open and democratic society with largely decent ambitions for its people, and one that did not require struggle to change. In a world in which most societies are not like that, it seems eccentric and provincial. The appropriate reaction to the genoicide which forms the background to Heart of Darkness would have been organized, violent and political. This is a place where Leavis does not want to go, and his account of it, in his chapter on Conrad, doesn't go there. Late in his career Leavis became embroiled in the Two Cultures affair. C P Snow, a mediocre knighted UK scientist, had written a series of excruciatingly pedestrian novels, well liked by admirers of Trollope. He then became seized with the incoherent idea that there were two cultures in Britain, which were failing to understand each other. One was science, the other the arts. To Leavis this was worse than stupid. There was one British culture, of which science and the arts were part. The question was its values and validity. He was, in retrospect, right about Snow, right about culture, but disastrously wrong to invoke Lawrence as a counterweight. Was he the Dr Johnson of our time? In some ways yes. In many ways yes. In the important ways, yes. When we read Dr Johnson, we do not find the same egregious misjudgments that we find in the late Leavis. Dr Johnson was never as wrong about anything as Leavis was about Lawrence. His famous account of the Metaphysical Poets wonderfully exemplifies someone seeing the qualities of a style of writing that is antithetical to his instincts, not valuing it as we do, but being open to its virtues nonetheless. This we do not find in Leavis. Leavis was never equivocal, his strength was not to see something he disliked in the round. He dismissed Flaubert, and you will never find him seeing that the Education Sentimentale is a masterly encylopedia of novelistic technique. He sees too clearly how uninteresting it is as a novel. But Leavis in his earlier phase has the same authoritative tone, and commands the same acceptance, for the same reason: he has arrived at his judgments by a real openness to the writing, and by close attention to what is actually on the page. His values are human. This is why he will be read a hundred years from now, with profit, when postmodernism and deconstruction are footnotes of intellectual history. He is a curious mixture of the brilliantly right and the wrong. Right in his valuation of what is human feeling and conscience, wrong to think Lawrence embodied it. Right to view with dismay the tide of mass culture, mass food, the debased currency of industrial society which we see now manifesting itself in England as a youth intent on drinking itself to oblivion every weekend as fast as possible. Wrong to think that the hand craftsmanship and rural pieties of Sturt's Wheelwrights Shop were the alternative. I heard Leavis lecture, but never knew him personally. However, he taught me how to read. In reading as he taught, I came to disagree with him, and so fell from grace with my teachers who were too faithful devotees. But he showed me something fundamental - that literature was too personal, too connected to the life of the feelings and morality, for one's thoughts on it to be submitted to peer review on publications, or grades by teachers. Getting a PhD would have been prostitution. The whole business of academic politics would have soiled it. It was not what he had in mind, to turn students away from the formal study of literature in universities, but I shall always be grateful to him for it. Because of it, literature stayed important, personal, and free. He is one of the icons of my youth who was real. Others had feet of clay, but his were rooted. He could say with Lawrence, thank God I am not free, any more than a rooted tree is free. He was rooted in a Cambridge and an England which is now gone, and his flaws often came from reactions to its flaws, as his strengths came from its strengths. He was a flawed man then, but a great one, and as he said of Forster, one whose name, in these times above all, we should particularly honor. For more on a wide array of other topics, please visit the oftwominds.com weblog. HTML, format and art copyright © 2007 Charles Hugh Smith, copyright to text and all other content in the above work is held by the author of the essay as of the publication date listed above. All rights reserved in all media. The views of the contributor authors are their own, and do not reflect the views of Charles Hugh Smith. All errors and errors of omission in the above essay are the sole responsibility of the essay's author. The writer(s) would be honored if you linked this Readers Journal essay to your site, or printed a copy for your own use.
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