REVIEW OF BOOKS
Denis Donoghue on the conspiratorial rhetoric of Dr Leavis
The celebrated poem from which Dr Leavis has taken his title* comes in the Pref are to Blake's Milton (1804); Blake declares I will not cease from Mental Fight, Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand Till be have built Jerusalem
In England's green and pleasant Land.
In prose, immediately before these verses, Blake issues a call to arms: " Rouze up, 0 Young Men of the New Age! set your foreheads against the ignorant Hirelings! For we have Hirelings in the Camp, the Court & the University, who would, if they *Nor Shall My Sword: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope F. R. Leavis (Chatto and Windus £2.50) could, for ever depress Mental & prolong Corporeal War." And immediately after, he sets down Moses's declaration in the Book of Numbers: "Would to God that all the Lord's people were Prophets "; a sentiment which students of Blake often gloss by reference to his letter to Hayley, December 11, 1805, where he says that "receiving a prophet as a prophet is a duty which, if omitted, is more severely punished than every sin or wickedness beside."
I have quoted these attendant passages because they provide the context, allowing for other differences, in which Dr Leavis presses the claim of his new book. It is a time of crisis, we are at war, our enemies are small men of :reat ower, there are only a few of the Lord's people left, but one of them is a great prophet and is received as such. There is no question of building a new Jerusalem: if Blake failed in that enterprise, Dr Leavis cannot hope to succeed, but something may still be achieved by his unsleeping sword. So in the past few years the prophet has been moving about, lecturing to the remnant, smiting his enemies. These lectures, printed in Nor Shall My Sword, begin with the Richmond Lecture of 1962 on the significance of Lord Snow. The Battle of Richmond is re-enacted in several later lectures, especially in Luddites? or There Is Only One Culture (1966) and Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope (1970). The lovely war is taken for granted as a shared victory in the remaining lectures, English, Unrest and Continuity (1969), ` Literarisrn ' versus 'Scientism': The Misconception and the Menace (1970), and Elites, Oligarchies and an Educated Public (1971)..
Dr Leavis's theme is that of his Education and the University (1943), the only difference being the exacerbation of his doctrine after thirty years of prophetic strife. The declared aim is "to re-establish an educated, well-informed, responsible and influential public — a public that statesmen, administrators, editors and newspaper proprietors can respect and rely on as well as fear." In the nature of the case, such a public is bound to be a minority, but it would exert a moral influence far beyond its number. It would probably be found in the universities, more vigorously in York than in Cambridge, according to Dr Leavis's evidence, but potentially in any university which has made itself "a centre of human consciousness." This is the answer to "a present extremely urgent need of civilisation." Dr Leavis does not offer to say precisely how such a university would be created, unless his insistence upon its 'collaborative ' and ` creative ' character is deemed to be enough. It would be the kind of university in which members of the English School would find it natural to discuss not only the great imaginative works of '.heir own language but such exacting works as those of Whitehead, Collingwood, Michael Polanyi and Marjorie Grene.
But it needs no ghost come from the grave of Scrutiny to tell us these things. There are already many universities in Which Dr Leavis's criteria are fulfilled. York is not alone in its endeavour. As for Cambridge: Dr Leavis has so often placed on Public exhibition the wounds he claims to have received there that it is difficult to respond to the sight: he cannot expect every day to be Poppy Day. "The academic is the enemy," he says, "and the academic can be beaten, as we who ran Scrutiny for twenty years proved." There is certainly a sense in which Scrutiny won, and it is surprising that Dr Leavis has not apparently derived as much satisfaction from the victory as one would have hoped: perhaps he recognises that any orthodoxy, even Scrutiny's, is liable to academic corruption. But he has chosen to keep the old war going in the old terms. He refers to "the atiude of the academic powers when, thirty years ago, I wrote a pioneering book on modern poetry that made Eliot a key figure and Proposed a new chart, and again when I backed Lawrence as a great writer." But Eliot was established as a key figure several years before Dr Leavis published. New Bearings in English Poetry (1932). He was such a figure in I. A. Richards's Science and Poetry (1926), the standard by which Lawrence and Yeats were judged. And there was a lot of critical money on Lawrence before Dr Leavis backed him. It is still true that New Bearings is a crucial book, the book we resort to for its sense of the modern achievement in poetry, but there is no need to make it yet another battlefield in the war of modern culture.
Besides, Dr Leavis is not short of enemies, if his own report is to be credited. In Nor Shall My Sword they are variously invoked as "'he world of the Guardian, the New Statesman, and the Sunday magazine-sections," "Snow's supPorters," "the system," "the neo-Wellsians " and "the technologico-Benthamite world." At one point Dr Leavis speaks of "the sickness that figures as student unrest, violence, drugs, sex-addiction, absenteeism and Lord Annan." One lord leads to another, and before this short book is done we find the prophet of doom denouncing Lords Snow, Todd, Robbins and Balogh. Then Edmund Leach is dragged out, presumably on the principle that the only good Provost of King's College, Cambridge, is a dead ProVost of Kings College, Cambridge. Bertrand Russell is already dead, victim of his own "enlightened wisdom." As for "the system," a sinister gang apparently employed as Muscle men by the British Council, the BC and the newspapers, their resources
are deployed against the offending critic or ' influence '; if he can't be suppressed he must be, by any means, discredited." Nonsense, of course: if someone has been trying to suppress Dr Leavis, he has not been faring well. It would be hard to think of any critic, with the possible exception of Frank Kermode, for Whom a standing invitation to the columns Of the Times, the Guardian, the Listener and other influential places is more demonstrably available. Dr Leavis must invent Conspiracies, or announce that the war is
over.
But he cannot face the possibility that Ms war is over, or that it has been re ''laced bv diffelent war, in another country. His style depends upon complicity with his reader, and it can only be maintained upon a syntax of accusation, conspiracy, intrigue, the good fight against evil men. The reader is required to enlist, or declare himself a coward. It is sometimes said that Dr Leavis cannot write, that he has a writing problem as other people have a drink problem. In fact, at his best he is a powerful writer, and, the elaborate deployment of qualifications, interjections, and parentheses has the effect of entangling the reader in a network of implication: he will not be released until the sentence is complete. Even in Nor Shall My Sword, which contains very little of Dr Leavis' achieved work, there is an occasional sentence which reminds the reader of better days. Citing the words ' ahnung ' and ' nisus,' Dr Leavis says: "Recently, as student collaborators will testify, I have resorted to them a great deal in the discussion of Eliot's religious poetry: the movement from the avowal of utter destitution in 'The Hollow Men' and the recognition of the nature of the need — need so exacting in its intensity that it imposes the astonishingly rendered continence of affirmation through Four Quartets to the word ' Incarnation ' in The Dry Salvages.'" But when Dr Leavis turns his mind away from poems, puts aside his text, and chooses instead to rally his troops, his style of complicity has nothing but venom as substance. "Snow is, of course, a — no, I can't say that: he isn't: Snow thinks of himself as a novelist." That probably got a bit of a giggle, ten years ago, at Downing, but it is not witty enough to be tried on a more disinterested audience. "How Margaret Drabble got a First at Cambridge I won't conjecture, but, as you know, She makes it public, and I've no doubt with truth, that she did, no work." Dashing stuff for aficionados at Gregynog, but hardly worth reprinting. Occasionally, Dr Leavis has allowed himself to yield to propriety. In Lectures in America he referred to "Mr Richard Wolheim, for example who is a sociologist, I believe." The present version reads: " Richard Wollheim, for example, who is a Profeasor of Philosophy . . ." But on the whole Dr Leavis's tone is offensive, gratuitously insulting.
But the chief defect of Nor Shall My Sword is that it virtually abandons, the only kind of work for which Dr Leavis is justly celebrated, the practical criticism of poems and novels. The names of Blake, Dickens, Shakespeare, and Lawrence are constantly invoked, but only their names, not their produced works. It may be claimed that Dr Leavis has done the practical work in earlier books, and the claim, except for Blake, is strong. But it is not strong enough to counter the argument that in speaking for these writers in the new book Dr Leavis is merely waving flags. He certainly has not earned the right to speak in Blake's name, on the strength of anything producible from this book or Revaluation. But in fact Dr Leavis does not address himself to literature at all, in the new book. The lectures were obviously designed to remind his audiences of work the lecturer had already done. So far as anything is cited for examination, it invariably comes from Guardian leaders, Spectator book-reviews, Granta quips, the
magazine-sections of the Observer and the Sunday Times, letters to the Times, articles in the Times Literary Supplement. Dr Leavis's interest in such items is admirable, though I would prefer to see in his work evidence of comparably as siduous reading in contemporary imaginative literature. Incidentally, a critic who finds time to read a Times obituary notice of Jimi Hendrix ought. to make time to read McLuhan's Understanding Media and not rely upon "the papers" for a dismissive account of it.
The evidence begins to assert itself, that Dr Leavis is not prepared to work very hard, after all, to achieve a sense of the real nature of contemporary life. These lectures rely upon a merely conventional sense of the ways in which other people live. He pronounces upon "the industrial masses," saying that they don't know how to use their leisure, "except • inertly — before the telly, in the car, in the bingohall, filling pools forms, spending money, eating fish and chips in Spain." There is no evidence t'hat he has the slightest feeling for those lives, or for any one life among those ' masses,' except the cliche-feeling provided, for him by the newspapers he affects to despise. When an article in the Times uses the word 'campus,' Dr Leavis says that the word "brings with it by implication all the American conditions — which are so rapidly becoming established here; the rootlessness, the vacuity, the inhuman scale, the failure of organic cultural life, the anti-human xeductivism that favours the American neo-imperialism of the computer." This is cheek, coming from a man who never set foot in America until he made a brief visit to Harvard and Cornell in 1966. I deny that he has any right to pronounce upon the conditions, so extraordinarily diverse, in which 200,000,000 people live their lives. In an introductory essay Dr Leavis quotes some familiar sentences from Blake: "To generalise is to be an idiot: Truth only exists in minutely organised particulars." And on his own behalf he asks: "how can Man be brought before us unless as a man?" But, having laid down the exact criteria, Dr Leavis ignores them in his rhetorical practice. When it is a question of culture, anarchy, and society, he forgets ate requirement of minutely organised particulars, unless he thinks that these are available in the nearest newspaper, and he makes assertions as inaccurate as they are immodest.
"In any case, you won't by subscribing moncy to bestow food, and the means of self-help, on the ' underdeveloped ' countries do anything towards making hunger an unnecessary evil." Anything? Well, true enough, giving a few pounds to Oxfam won't solve the grand tragedy, but it may prolong the lives of a few people who would otherwise starve. It seems more helpful than telling them to eat cake. I am sure Dr Leavis is as humane as anyone else, but he is now the victim of his own rhetoric, a rhetoric mannered and baroque when It is not placed at the service of major literature. The new book is self-indulgent, loose and general where it ought to be precise, a conspiratorial rhetoric for which no sufficient evidence has been produced.
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