The metropolitan outback

Ian Robinson

The Metropolitan Critic Clive James (Faber £3.95) The "metropolitan critic" of Mr James's titleessay is Edmund Wilson, but the jacket rakes it plain that Mr James wants the title tor himself too. As he says in the Foreword, With what some will think charm and others Cheek, "At several points within I make the . large claim that literary journalism is the ' substance of criticism, not the shadow ... that Principle still seems to me true enough: anyway, it's too late now to start all over again in cloistered solitude." With one foot in 1301) ("he considers lyric-writing as his main activity" — blurb) and television revues he is still able to plant the other firmly in the other sort of review, for the weeklies and Sundays, _arid so to occupy what for many of the envious academics he despises is the still point of the turning world. The book is a collection of work done in the F,ourse of what lucky Mr James calls the normal course of reviewing" and ranges over Modern poetry, critics, the to-do about Oz, Women's lib, and all the way to the gOssip cniutnn of the TLS. One has a vision of the an of letters who is also the man of affairs: easily at home in the modern real world, Well-read but untainted by academicism, Making sure that sweetness and light reign at the very centre; the academic's dream! To be a metropolitan critic, though, or an academic critic, one has first got to be just a critic. Any critic can only be judged by the critical sense he makes, the critical thought he Inanges to create. I don't believe Mr James is critic. His best reviews are far from stupid or Ileless or illiterate, but there is no thought in them. Can there be criticism without thought? Perhaps it sounds paradoxical to say a man c.,ari be a good reviewer without thinking. Mr James's good reviews, the ones that as an academic editor I would have been glad to Print, are the ones that some other academics call shooting sitting ducks. Shooting sitting clocks seems to me one very useful task for a reviewer: the alternative is that the sitting ducks inherit the earth. (Mr James uses the !triage himself in a review of Colin Wilson's autobiography which is in part an example of What I mean.) The review of Richard Poirier's Performing Self is good in this way. Mr James gives enough rope by way of damning quotations and then says, sharply and finally, "At !his point refutation must stop. There is nothing to say except: if you are not serious pout the great works of art, get right away ,orn them and leave them to those who are." 'es indeed, well put, the right nail hit sharply ea the head — and effortlessly. The remark is a sane response, and if all reviewers made sane responses the world wouldn't be in its Present mess. Mr James is similarly and easily right about Theodore Roszak, Charles Reich, and a good many more of his subjects. Elsewhere Mr James is sometimes equally cuL▪ gilt, though long-winded and flabby in a way ` net may even remind one of his bugbears, the academics. He has hardly anything actually to sn.Y about Edmund Wilson, the patron saint of the collection; and the follow-up essay, a review of Alvarez's Savage God, though it has something to say, delays the essential and Pretty damning comments on the book with Pages of highflown compliment that make the Whole piece self-contradictory. Mr James sees certain inauthenticity in the Alvarez-Plathnaghes insistence on extremity, violence, the concentration camps, and he quotes a facile quatrain of Lowell's and refers to Solzhenitsyn with telling effect. But he isn't like Orwell rebuking Auden about the necessary murder, because the real work of the essay follows reviewers' pomposities like "The Savage God is an important contribution to recent criticism." Mr James feels obliged to call Alvarez important because of the limitations of Mr James's world.

Outside the pages on modern poetry, whenever he needs to think (and what else are books for?) Mr James is nonplussed. He talks about four "past masters" — not very far in the past, all this century. The essay on D. H. Lawrence is a longish account of Lawrence's frequent changes of address, full of compliments to his beautiful prose and his easy grasp of reality and interspersed with the kind of reviewese which establishes the reviewer's superiority to the genius reviewed, as well as to the intimidated reader: "No sooner is Lawrence in Italy than we discover that the Italians have dark interiors too . . . the passion of the bones was evidently judged by Lawrence to be pretty unwieldy ... England ... was declared 'a dead dog that died of a love disease like syphilis.' Bad news for Koteliansky, who was living in it at the time." And so on: Mr James's acquaintance with Lawrence's vast oeuvre is fairly extensive but he just hasn't thought about it or responded more deeply than the novel-a-week reviewer.

It is much worse with Ford Madox Ford. There is an obvious critical question here: what is the relation between Ford's compulsive lying (if that is what to call it) and his creativity as novelist and genius as editor? Mr James lapses, instead of making any shot at considering it, into the most awful reviewvulgarity:

Even at his youngest and trimmest Ford looked like an earless Bugs Bundy on stilts, and by his own admission he was more interested in chat than sex: nevertheless the Grade A crumpet came at him like kamikazes, crashing through his upper decks in gaudy cataracts of fire. Violet Hunt took him away from his first wife, Elsie. Violet had already gone

through the contemporary literati like a flamethrower, only Henry James escaping unsinged. She ate arsenic for her looks and already had tertiary syphilis when she got off with Ford. A woman who had somehow managed to hit the sack with Somerset Maugham was a sexual force of primal urgency.

What to say of that except that there is an urgent need for some sub-editor's blue pencil to be sharpened? And to collect the stuff into a book! Something has gone wrong somewhere.

I remember having seen the review of the Leavises' Lectures in America somewhere or other, and that when I did I was pleased that anybody should agree with me that F. R. Leavis is a philospher. But it's no good, Mr James's essay won't stand up to a second reading. For it turns out that all he means by philosophy is "to speak on issues": that is he is merely joining the ignorant consensus saying that the present-day philosophers do nothing but play word-games. Similarly, rebuking the world in general for the "problem posed by the semi-intelligentsia," Mr James himself richly embodied the subject of his discussion: After Wittgenstein, plain language went the way of personal relationships. By the late thirties the field was left to the literary, critics, the world-savers/ commonsensers, and the shady purveyors of philosophy-fiction. An awkward situation then arose: the literary critics (type Leavis), who had most of the real ideas, disclaimed pretensions to philosophical rigour at the same time that the world-saving (type Russell) plain-language philosophers, who had most of the unreal ones, disclaimed pretensions to literary scrupulosity.

Could that have been written by anybody who had seriously thought about even a fraction of the work of Wittgenstein, or Russell, or, for that matter, Leavis?

Mr James's essays on modern poets, especially the Americans, are another matter, and one I can only comment on gingerly because he knows a lot more about Wilbur, Berryman, Roethke and the rest than I do. His comments on his quotations are often convincing enough, and Mr James seems to be doing all the things a reviewer of poetry should — except the essentials, giving the reader confidence that the reviewer can hear the genuine new poetic voice, and showing that the reviewer has the standards of a whole literature behind him when he hears it. This is what I meant by the limitations of Mr James's world. It isn't that he hasn't read things: he may well have read too many things; and he is well-informed about what has happened in English poetry since about 1950. But what has really happened in English poetry in the last quarter of a century? Mr James says extremely damaging things about poets who later turn out to be "outstanding talents": what he never does is unequivocally stake his reputation on any poet as a great one. I think this is because he can't.

When one says things like "there is no contemporary English poetry that matters" one is always interpreted as rebuking the quite genuine talents (even "outstanding," maybe) such as Mr James tries to assess. Actually the observation is meant to be about conditions and possibilities. Poetry has no place in our world, and if there is going to be another great poet he must start by re-creating a world in which he can do his work; and it will have to include criticism, the possibility

of recognition. • Criticism for F. R. Leavis is the same as the continuity of culture, and it is his work on transmitting literature that gives Leavis, in a barren age, a necessary importance. The continuance of literature is only in our serious experience of it. Leavis's wcrk on this chain that anchors us to the great poets is what

makes the present age of our literature the age of Leavis, even though he has published

no poetry or novels himself, in much the way that the 1770s are the age of Johnson the critic. But if criticism is a chain it has many

weak links. Most academic book-making and book-reviewing is one, and Mr James hits this target sometimes. (It's so broad one would have thought it impossible to miss, were it not that people do.) My own experience is that there is far more likelihood of honest and even thoughtful comment in the weeklies than the academic quarterlies, and that for sheer shameless prejudice, ignorance of both the subject and the work reviewed, and misrepresentation, the latter beat the former any day.

But even if the best comes to the best, which is not often to-be expected of a review, it is the nature of most reviews to be ephemeral. (If Mr James had expected his book to survive until 1980 he should have glossed phrases such as "What a burn!" and "The book's a bust" because nobody then will know which side of the great reviewing-divide, adverse/ favourable, these phrases are supposed to put books.) Reviewers are harmless, necessary drudges, rather like sewermen keeping the drainage system free so that the detritus of civilisation can sink unimpeded into oblivion but also capable Of rescuing gold if they see any. Only rarely, though, has a review a life of longer than a week. Lawrence's Phoenix; Eliot's Selected Essays are mostly reprinted reviews, so is Leavis's Common Pursuit. But they are the work of great minds, and it isn't unduly insulting to say Mr James is not in their class.

If The Metropolitan Critic has any place in history it is within the theme of the effects of pop on the metropolitan establishment and vice versa. Apart from a new style of vulgarity and the fresh demonstration that the establishment is infinitely elastic, the changes seem minimal; the normal course of reviewing seems to be much as before. Members of the literary power elite come and go; the style of Mr James's acknowledgments is revealing, especially the one to "Ian Hamilton, for all this period literary editor of The Times Literary Supplement, editor of the Review and trailblazer for his generation" (and now also of course editor of the New Review, which at first glance appears to be the Arts Council's gift to Pseuds Corner); but as things have been they remain and the disconnections between both metropolitans and academics on the one hand and criticism on the other go on making a living literature immensely improbable.

Ian Robinson has most recently written The Survival of English, a study in cultural decline.