SIR, —All Dr. Leavis's nastier , remarks about Snow are so peculiarly
applicable to himself that I can't help feeling his real worry is doubt about his own raison d'être in the literary world. It is Leavis, not Snow, who has a significantly ugly style; Leavis, not Snow, who invents an imaginary opposition and then dis- poses of it; Leavis, not Snow, whose 'assurance ex- presses itself in a pervasive tone; a tone of which one can say that, while only genius could justify it, one cannot readily think of genius adopting it.' Poor Dr. Lcavis: one suddenly feels terribly sorry for him. He's got to be right, otherwise his whole silly cir- cumscribed world becomes totally meaningless. He's got to be a literary guru, otherwise he becomes a mere rude don on the verge of retirement. He's got to plug the English School as the focal point of a university, otherwise his career in retrospect is the merest mockery. He's got to destroy Snow's world, because he knows in his heart of hearts that sooner
or later that world will overwhelm his own. The one thing he daren't scrutinise is his own heart.
How pathetic a figure, when you get down to it; how pitiable the undergraduate huff-and-puff, how frantic the insults—mere whistling in the dark to keep one's courage up—how transparent the motiv- ation! Above all, how heart-breaking the Rhadaman- thine self-delusion, the moral-cum-literary arbiter sitting in judgment over the centuries, muttering to himself that many are called, but few are chosen! If only he hadn't exerted such an influence, one might cheerfully leave him alone in his lower-middle-class critical Bethel, nursing an outsize persecution mania and pulling rude faces like Lucky Jim. Unfortunately, he happens to be news—a fact which no doubt gives him great satisfaction. But something tells me he won't be news much longer; and I have no doubt he will while away his old age with theories of how the TLS and the Sunday Times and the Guardian are all conspiring to muzzle the fearless, martyred guardian of our cultural heritage.
One last word. People tend to think of Dr. Leavis as a new phenomenon. Not a bit of it. Thomas Nashe had his number very well in the Anatomy of Absurdities: 'I leaue these in their follie, and hasten to other mens furie, who make the Presse the dung- hill whether they carry all the muck of their melan- cholicke imaginations, pretending forsooth to anato- mize abuses and stubbe vp sin by the rootes, when as there waste paper being wel viewed, seemes fraught with nought els sane dogge daies effects, who ... ex- tend their inuectiues so farre against the abuse, that almost the things remaines not whereof they admitte anie lawfull vse.'
PETER GREEN
Glebe Cottage, Redgrave, Near Diss *
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