REVIEW OF BOOKS

Richard Luckett on a distinguished disaster

The Oxford Anthology of English Literature' IS some four and a half thousand pages in length. The two volumes of the paperbound edition are each accompanied by a bookmark, Oil which the,publishers hopefully inform us that, despite the large size of the volumes they should, given reasonable care, last for

Many years; they then go on to recommend that "the book be placed in a flat position for reading." Seldom can the nature of such a

work have been so disarmingly admitted. These volumes are not to be read slouched in a chair or recumbent in bed. Nor can they be Perused on a railway journey or in a boat. It

w,ould be exceedingly difficult to read them in the bath. In fact they cannot be used in any of the normal positions with which the act ot

reading is associated; and in a way this is fair enough, for they are not to be read, but to be studied. They are the modern student of lit erature's answer to those bulky volumes toted by his colleagues in the sciences, which contain all that is needful to be known in first, second or third year metallurgy,

centistry, astrophysics or vector analysis between one pair of covers — except that ELliglish literature which has to do with books, needs two. This being so, why should readers of The Spectator be bothered by volumes best left to

'all to pieces of their own accord? It seems to me that there is a reason though a depressing Everybody is now only too familiar ;with an emotion, peculiar to the twentieth

-enturY, for which no name as yet exists, but ,t‘.141/at might be called anticipatable incredulity. t. e walk through a Georgian square and no.lce empty houses and windows boarded up.

lorry or crane indicates the imminence of Workmen. It would be logicial to suppose that it is about to be restored, but a small, insistent Voice points out that against all the dictates of reason and amenity it simply awaitsde

v,eloPment A month or so later this will in',seed prove to have been the case; property dealers, the local council, the Church Comnliv.is_sioners or an institution of learning will "ve begun on that work of desolation which seems, at present, to be their ap Pointed mission. If I emerged from an ex!Mination of these volumes slightly battered l„t Was not simply because the only way of ,."ei,rig them (bar putting them on a desk) in 41v.ed. lying on the floor; what was far more dispiriting was to find oneself going through

the motions of anticipatable incredulity .Yet once again — the result is just as barba rous as one might expect but should not (in re key phrase of anticipatable incredulity) vVect to expect.

The name ' Oxford ' has a certain reso11...anCe. Now that Britain has exchanged her

World role for that or dragoman tit, the ‘,,,vorld hundreds of thousands of foreigners 'lock here every year desirous to learn 'Ox

The Oxford Anthology of English Literature A'Itecl by Frank Kermode and John Hollander

vols, Oxford University Press, each volume Eft.75, boards, £3.75 paper) ford English It is a puzzling request, the origins of which are attributable less to the universal popularity of P. G. Wodehouse, than to the fact that the authoritative dictionary of the English language is published by the Oxford University Press. The mere fact of the Oxford label will be enough to ensure that this book makes its way in the world, that it ends up on the desks of students wherever English is spoken or studied. The first question is whether a press of such standing should have projected such a work at all, and the second, whether, having done so, it has carried it out in a satisfactory manner.

I doubt whether the idea would have been taken seriously had it not been for existing teaching practices in some North American Universities. The Oxford Anthology appears to owe its genesis to the New York branch of the Press, and is an obvious rival to the many compilations of this kind which have circulated in the United States for some time. Of the six editors four are from universities in the States. The explanatory material is often directed at readers who lack a knowledge of the British background. The argument presumably went something like this: anthologies may be terrible but they are used; most of the existing ones are very poor; we do not seem to be getting a share of the market; surely we can do better. So, in the *eneral editors' terms, we have a "selective canon of the entire range of English literature . . . with introductory matter and authoritative annotation," the method of which is " historical, in the broadest sense." So much for those of us who thought that a canon 'in this context was necessarily selective, or that phrases such as " historical, in the broadest sense" begged more questions than they answered. At the same time, one sees what the editors mean; this is an anthology of English literature; it selects, from the already highly selective concept of ' literature ', works which are deemed to be necessary reading for those seeking to understand that literature. It automatically suggests an over-view, and this is something that the editors' further remarks bear out; selections from The Faerie Queen are designed to provide an ' epitome' of the poem; minor texts have been chosen for their exemplary force.' In short, the whole project postulates a particular approach to literature, with an emphasis on categorisation, distillation, and the study of what one of the editors calls "the dynamics of literary influence."

The absurdity of this approach is nowhere better revealed than in the case of Shakespeare. The editors clearly decided that they ought to include a play by Shakespeare (they call it a " Shakesperean play," but let it pass). They eventually selected The Tempest and hold this choice aloft as proof that a "genuinely modern taste, rather than an eager modishness, has helped to shape our presentation of the historical canon." It is an extraordinary statement. Literary history is methodologically confused at the best of times, since a critical decision (is this literature or not?) precedes the strictly historical judgements..But here the editorspostulate 1) a historical canon; 2) a standard of taste which is characteristic of the age they live in and which it is their job to represent; 3) that their task in this anthology is to fuse the two. So their choice of The Tempest is tantamount to a statement that "in our opinion, of the plays by Shakespeare which have in the past been admired, The Tempest is the one chiefly suited to what we presume to be the taste of our generation." It is as though the object of editing an anthology such as this was to bequeath to future generations as pure a monument as possible to the characteristic preferences of our age. But why include a Shakespeare play anyway? Do the editors imagine that they are providing the sole text that is likely to come the way of their audience? Or that they are catering for teachers who will not see to it that their pupils obtain and use the collected works?

Frank Kermode and John Hollander, the general editors of the anthology, are both more than respected academics. Hollander is a good poet and the author of a splendid expository work on ideas of music in sixteenth and seventeenth century literature; Kermode is a critic who at times attains to brilliance. The unsatisfactory nature of the anthology is fundamental; nobody could have made a good job of it, because there was never a good job to be done. Victorian prose, for instance, includes Carlyle, Mill, Newman, Ruskin, Arnold, Huxley, Morris, Pater, Butler and Wilde, but there is no novel by Dickens (Dickensian novel), nor even a fragment (to serve as an epitome); nothing by George Eliot; nothing by Thackeray. Because they are not represented they do not feature in the bibliography. Surely an audience which has to be spoonfed with a Shakespeare play needs telling about the novel, however unanthologisable it may be? Jane Austen, so far as I can discover, is not at any point mentioned. It is at this juncture that Professors Kermode and Hcillander do emerge as being in some sense responsible — or irresponsible; it may be in the nature of anthologies that Lawrence's St Mawr is printed in full whilst nothing by the authors whom I have mentioned is included, but if this book is to be used in the horrible way in which all the evidence suggests it will be used, then the editors have a duty to mid:gate the effects of this so far as it lies in their power to do so. The alternative is a critical anthology, in which the personal taste of the compilers is given free rein, but their definition of their task prevented them from attempting that at the start.

The anthology has certain negative virtues. It does not propose rigid compartments into which everything must fit, it has intelligently selected illustrations, the type is as clear as the format is horrible. It is seldom pompous. On the other hand many of the annotations are misleading or even inaccurate. Most of these errors are petty (the date of Auden's The Orators, for instance, is two years out) but this does not redeem them. The information that "Byron was a swimmer of European reputation " could well create a totally misleading impression on a reader as ignorant as the one this anthology presumes; it would have been simpler and better to note that he had swum the Hellespont. But perhaps that would have needed explanation as well. What is much more disturbing is the incidence of slack writing in the prefatory material; cant phrases like " ritualised behavour " are by no means uncommon, whilst the authority on Victorian prose has trouble with his syntax (" the intonations of direct address . is perhaps most explicit in the novelists of the day "). Some of the accounts of writers' characters are far from objective: thus we are told that Byron was "passive towards women, sodomistic, sado-masochistic, fundamentally homosexual, and early disgusted with all sexual experience anyway," and that it was only with his half-sister that he " seems to have gotten beyond narcissistic self-regard." There may be a proper place to express this view, but the author of the passage in question has yet to find it. It is hard to regard the Oxford Anthology as anything other than a disaster. Perhaps it should rate as a distinguished one, since F. Kermode, J. Hollander, H. Bloom, M. Price, J. B. Trapp and L. Trilling have all had a hand in bringing it about. They should have known better — but an ticipatable incredulity has, as one of its many corollaries, that people never do.