F.R. Leavis
Peter Ackroyd
The death of Frank Raymond Leavis, at the age of eighty-two, marks the end of the last major phase in English literary criticism.
His achievements as a polemicist and critic have been substantial, and not even his detractors — they have been many and pow erful — would deny his persuasive powers both as a teacher and as a writer. He was born in 1895, and went up to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, as a scholar just after the first World war. It is with Cambridge University, and its teaching of English Lit erature, that Leavis's name has been most closely linked. It was here, after all, while earning a meagre living as a tutor at Downing College, that he formulated his major statements about the nature of literature.
Dr Leavis completed twenty books, but his finest was also one of his earliest. New Bearings in English Poetry was published in 1932; it was the first intelligent account of
the work of Eliot, Pound and Gerard Man ley Hopkins to appear in English and it significantly altered critical awareness in this country. The account of modernist poetry which was first formulated there has often been challenged, but it has yet to be dis
credited. A later book, Revaluation (1936),
had a similar effect and has had a similar reputation: Leavis rediscovered the Metaphysical poets, and they have remained ever since an essential part of that 'living tradition' to which Leavis devoted his whole career.
In the Forties, Leavis turned his critical attention to prose, and his account of
George Eliot, Henry James and Joseph Conrad (in The Great Tradition, 1948) remains a standard text. It was here, also, that he expounded what became the major concern of his criticism: these three novel
ists were 'significant in terms of the human awareness they promote; awareness of the possibilities of life.' It was this sense of 'life' and the importance of 'human awareness' that marked all of Leavis's criticism, and which distinguished him sharply both from narrowly academic critics and the bellelettrists of literary journalism. It is not too much to say that Leavis, through his editor
ship of Scrutiny —perhaps the last influential literary journal in this country — and
through his critical works, gave to literary criticism a thoroughness and respectability which has never since been equalled. Now, in our time, when 'lit crit' has simply become a vehicle for sociologists and structuralists to expound their marginal theories, the importance of his own work becomes more obvious. Even his specific judgments no longer seem as eccentric as they once did: his put-down of Auden, for example, has yet to be satisfactorily answered.
A later book, The Common Pursuit (1952), refined and extended his sense of what the relations between literature and human life could become, when he declared that `to have a living literature is to have an informing spirit in civilisation, an informed, charged and authoritative awareness of inner human nature and human need.' This was an explicitly moral declaration, and itt his later books Leavis became a kind of missionary, extending his critical judgments into an analysis of our society and its declining civilisation. He sustained and elab0. rated this analysis right up to the end; and in his last book, Thought, Words and Creativity (1976) he returned once again to his central point: . . . the creativity threatened bY industrial civilisation, with its power to mechanise what lives in it or by it, depends on the robustly individual human being — the profound creative individuality that can draw on the source that lies deep down, uncontrolled by the ego, and is the source of spontaneity.' This is not negligible or inarticulate writing, however fashionable it was — and still is — to sneer at it. And if literary criticism can ever lay claim to moral seriousness, then it is indisputably from passages of this kind. Inevitably, Dr Leavis made enemies. The more his teaching spread through the universities and schools, the more ferocious his opponents became. His tone remained caustic; he made established persons feel uneasy. There was, for example, his famous battle with C.P. Snow over 'the two cultures', which caused considerable controversy when it was reprinted in the Spectator; it could not be said that Lord Snow came out well from the encounter. At Cambridge, too, Leavis evoked fierce allegiances and counter-allegiances; he was denied a University post for many years, and lived there in virtual poverty, while writing his finest criticism. The members of the London literary establishment, too., never appreciated his comments upon thetr courage or their honesty. None of them paid much attention to his warnings about the decline in our civilisation but now, a.tir. rounded by the Arts Council and television 'arts' programmes, there are very few Ivo.' ple who would deny the rightness of Ills judgments. In a letter he wrote to me in 1975, Leavis declared that, since he was an octogenarian, he was 'bound to practise a tight economY of time' and energy in what I must learn to think of as my old age'. He never felt cool' pletely vindicated — there was always more to do and to say — although his Cornpanionshipof Honour must have afforded bon some belated sense of public recognition' But it is not by public honours that he will.be remembered, only by his writing. Leavis s work, at its best, has an urgency and moral fervour which reclaim the finest spirit of literary humanism. It is the mark of .a great critic to impart authority to literature at the same time as he gives value to our lives; it Is in this sense that Dr Leavis deserves to be remembered and honoured.
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