The Messiah of Modernism_ F. R. Leavis (1895-1978)

8/2/2019 The Messiah of Modernism_ F. R. Leavis (1895-1978)

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The Messiah of Modernism: F. R. Leavis (1895-1978)Author(s): George WatsonReviewed work(s):Source: The Hudson Review, Vol. 50, No. 2 (Summer, 1997), pp. 227-241Published by: The Hudson Review, IncStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3852750 .

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GEORGE WATSON

The Messiah of Modernism:F.R. Leavis (1895-1978)

Evenin old age he looked agile and burnished, as one who

loved the sun. By his fifties, when I first knew him, his baldbrown head was ringed by a natural tonsure, conferring anundeniable air of dedication, even a touch of the monkish, andhis face was always marked by a severe reserve. In fact I could notconfidently say that I ever saw Leavis smile, and his narrowfeatures looked ill-constructed for the purpose. As for the voice,it was tense and obsessive, with some striking mannerisms likerepeating a final phrase on a rising intonation: "... in anyintelligible way, in any intelligible way," the last syllable beinguttered with an intensity that was almost intimidating. His per?sonality appeared to be elaborately constructed in order toimpress, with words like "central" and "necessary" being used witha cold finality that settled all debate. Proud of his French accent,he always pronounced names like Proust in the French way?usually to disparage, however, since his loyalties from first to lastwere insular.

It would be misleading to say that his manner was bullying. Butyou often sensed a bottled anger ready to explode, which explainswhy his arguments were so seldom answered in committee?a factthat may have encouraged him to think them unanswerable. Inprivate conversation he could be aggressively forgiving, as if onlyan abject apology for past wrongs could be expected from you,and a crucified sweetness of manner, almost unctuous at times,made an implicit claim to have suffered for his beliefs. Hedemanded submission, nothing less. By his middle years he hadshed all the friends who were of an age near his own, since theyhad found the price of his friendship too high to pay, and knewonly disciples of a younger generation, who seldom interruptedand never contradicted. He was the messiah, by then, of literaryModernism, a leader and a prophet.


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228 THE HUDSON REVIEW

When it comes to messiahs there is no middle way, and you canonly believe in them or not. As an unbeliever I felt a naturalembarrassment in the company of F.R. Leavis. It is never com?fortable to be forgiven, especially for a fault one has not yetcommitted. This is a report, then, composed outside the charmedcircle, as from a bystander. But for that very reason I may havemissed a good deal. To be inside it, beyond doubt, could be anexciting experience. Leavis did not seem a dry, self-importantlittle man to everyone. There were those who openly avowed hewas their only reason for being in literary studies at all, and whenthat enthusiasm faded or collapsed, as it inevitably did, they wereleft with little but the sad realization that they had been interestedin Leavis rather than in literature. "When Leavis read poetryduring a lecture," one disciple has written, "it could seem as if forthe moment the world stopped." That, in the glory days, was howit had felt to be a Leavisite. L.C. Knights, who in 1932 was tobecome the first editor of Scrutiny, has told how discipleshipbegan at their very first meeting, when Leavis read to him apassage from Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress. No one can explain suchmoments; there is no arguing with the mystery of charisma. All ofwhich leaves the historian at a loss. Like an historian of NationalSocialism, he is left now with the impossible task of conjuring animage out of a shade.

The charisma, it seems clear, began only in his middle years,and those who knew Leavis before the 1930s knew another being:diffident, conformist to the views of his late father, who had beena prosperous and eminent citizen of Cambridge, and modestabout his own personal attainments. His most admired mentor inyouth seems to have been the Reverend G.G. Coulton, an elderlyhistorian of the English Middle Ages and hardly a disturbinglyradical figure, with whom the young Leavis took bicycle-rides afterlunch, following Coulton (so an eyewitness once told me) day byday out of town at a respectful distance of several yards.

In anearly letter, written soon after graduating in 1921, he onceconfessed to "a singularly unprepossessing gaucherie," which isdisarming; and his doctoral thesis, which lies unpublished inCambridge, is entitled The Relationship of Journalism to Literature(1924). A wholly conventional piece, it traces the early evolutionof English periodicals from their seventeenth-century origins


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down to Addison and Steele, and it is plainly the work of acard-indexing young historian. His early life continued to moveforward on conventional lines. In the late 1920s he taught inCambridge, mainly for women's colleges, and in 1929 he marriedone of his pupils, Queenie Roth.

He was not precocious. His first book, and perhaps his best,New Bearings in English Poetry (1932), appeared when he wasnearing forty, and it is a becomingly modest work. Its preface is adeclaration of loyalty to T.S. Eliot, who by then was so celebratedthat he did not need to be named. "How little I suppose theseconsiderations to be original, the book will make plain: it islargely an acknowledgement, vicarious as well as personal, ofindebtedness to a certain critic and poet," adding that thearguments had been "commonplaces for some years." Which theyhad. By 1932 LA. Richards had long been lecturing on Eliot inCambridge, which perhaps explains the odd word "vicarious"; sothe avowal, though modest, is also just. Ending as a master ofdisciples, he began, almost deferentially, as a disciple

to a master.There is a darker side, to be sure, to Leavis' early life. A pacifist,

like his father, he had served as a Red Cross orderly on theWestern Front in 1916-18, where death and mutilation wereordinary sights; and three years later his father, a well-to-dotradesman in musical instruments, died in hospital of headinjuries nearly two weeks after a motorcycling accident, in May1921, and by a tragic coincidence Leavis began his final exami?nations on the very day

of his death, achieving his degree, in thefirst class, a few weeks short of the mature age of twenty-six.

Such private griefs are only with difficulty to be balancedagainst the imaginary ones that accumulated over a long life. Bythe time he died, in 1978, in his eighties, so much of his own lifehad been reimagined that it is by now a laborious task to unpickthe real from the fictitious. He came to think of himself as poor,though in 1921 he had inherited a modest competence from asuccessful father, and during the depressed thirties often seemedmore affluent than his colleagues. He convinced himself that hisdigestion had failed, and would sit like a death's head at collegedinners, eating nothing, though his old friend Denys Thompsonwould tell how, out of Cambridge, he could eat as hearty a dinneras anyone. He came to think of himself as an outsider toCambridge English, though in his youth he had been encouraged


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by Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, then the only professor of Englishthere. He came to believe, too, that the Faculty had failed toappoint him, or had appointed him only belatedly, though hemust have known that faculties in Cambridge do not appoint. Hecame to believe that his friends and even members of his ownfamily were enemies, probably because he sometimes confided tothem out of hearing of his wife, who then anathematized themand forbade them the house. The several biographies of Leavisthat have recently appeared?there were two in 1995?all moreor less hagiographical, largely fail to understand how much of hissorrow was self-induced. There was no need for him to be soresolutely unhappy. He lived a prosperous life in the universitytown where he was born, was hearkened unto and even, by some,revered. No doubt his griefs were sincere and keenly felt.Whether they had much substance is another matter.

His resentments were at once petty and heroic. Petty, becauseit matters rather little, many would say, in a tragic century markedby starvation and genocide, whether or not academic tenure wasgranted a year or two late; heroic, in that he persuaded so manyaround him that he had narrowly survived an enormous andconcerted persecution by an academic and literary establishmentfearful of a truth that only he would tell. That myth of persecutionlay at the heart of his charisma. No other literary critic, andperhaps no other academic, has ever persuaded a large part ofadvanced opinion in his time and against the evidence that hehad been systematically wronged;

no other ever built a myth ofpersecution so successfully into what he uttered and wrote. To bea Leavisite was to believe unquestioningly in the myth of Leavis'life. Other thinkers of the age excited interest by what they said.Leavis, in his day, excited it by what he was, or rather by what heclaimed to be. He was the crucified hero of Modernism, and thosewho denied him, in that mythology, were worse than opponents.They were the enemies of civilization itself.

This was the magic circle one might choose to enter orobstinately remain outside. It has left many accounts. In All MenAre Islands (1964), Ronald Duncan, poet and playwright, has toldhow, when you were taught by Leavis, you became "conspiratorswhose aim was to blow up the English Faculty"; and, even better,you learned that you did not have to read much to think you knewit all, since in the whole of English literature "there are not more


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GEORGE WATSON 231

than a hundred pages of the first quality." Of course freshmenlike to be told that: discipleship relieved you of the burdens ofcuriosity. If you were a Leavisite, there was no need to wear youreyes out. Another pupil, Donald Davie, once shrewdly remarked,in Ronald Hayman's My Cambridge (1977), that Leavis' minorityculture was modelled on the English dissenting tradition of agathered church?a communion of saints, no less?and that theirreplaceable charm of his quarterly journal Scrutiny (1932-53)lay ultimately in the simple fact that every issue made you apresent of "perhaps a dozen authors or books or whole periodsand genres of literature which I not only need not, but should notread."

Leavis, in fact, made life look excitingly simple; he created aworld of easy dismissal. Peter Hall, first director of the NationalTheatre in London, once mused in his Diaries (1983), on hearingof his death in April 1978, that as a student you only pretended toimbibe humanism in his lectures. "In fact we were enjoying hischaracter assassinations," adding,

a touchnaively: "Strange

that agreat moralist could be so destructive about creative artists."Certainly not unparalleled, however, when you think of Plato andSavonarola. At all events Leavis had achieved a Siberia-stylereputation by his middle years; and in literary London, by the1940s, Cambridge had come to sound like a distant tundra of lostsouls. In his verse autobiography Summoned by Bells (1960), JohnBetjeman, who seldom went there, made it sound subarctic:

When all the way from Cambridge comes a windTo blow the lamps out every time they're lit,I know that I must light mine up again.

It was always difficult, in those years, to convince an outsiderhow modest a place Leavis played in the life of literary Cam?bridge. His disciples within Cambridge, by contrast, neverdoubted it, and they were right. His reputation was not local butworldwide.

That, in part, was because he was a master of publicity, andskillfully kept his name before the world, notably in polemicalletters to editors, long after his capacity to lecture or write bookshad waned. Perhaps Letters in Criticism (1974), which usefully


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collects them, will stand to future ages as his most characteristicwork. In February 1962 his vituperative attack on C.P. Snow's TwoCultures (1959) was a well-calculated thunderbolt from a Jovewhose arsenal was plainly running low. It embarrassed its studentaudience in Cambridge but sent shock waves through the media,even the tabloid press. When he reached retirement age, a fewmonths later, he was appointed to teach at the new university ofYork, and there followed his only lecture-tour of the UnitedStates. But by then the shades were lengthening. In 1965, when aperiodical called The Cambridge Quarterly was founded in hishonor,1 recriminations with his disciples followed, and his lastdozen years were passed in a flurry of personal accusations of badfaith. One of his disciples barely restrained himself from shouting"Liar, liar," it is said, as he left the room, fresh in the discovery ofwhat many had known for years: that Leavis was blessed, orcursed, with a creative memory.

So he was. But there are, after all, lies and lies. What are we tocall those where the offender begins by convincing himself?Fantasy is not lying, in any simple sense, and by the time Leavisuttered he had long since convinced himself that what he said wastrue. His mind was endlessly fertile in self-deception. He hadnever cared for scholarly accuracy, in any case. It was foreign tothe whole school of LA. Richards he had been reared in, since itsmacked (it was believed) of spiritual poverty. "I am a partisan ofliterature," I once heard Richards say in a public lecture. "I havenever professed scholarship, and if I were offered scholarship Iwould not accept it." I never heard Leavis say anything like that,but his whole manner and conduct proclaimed it, and it is thesort of remark, alas, all too likely to endear itself to a studentaudience. It makes life look simple and easy.It was only after his Cambridge retirement in 1962, however,that the larger instances of fantasizing became public. A commit?tee set up by Downing College to recommend a successordisbanded at once when he told them, unprompted, that thecollege had assured him he could choose one for himself. In July1973 his old collaborator Denys Thompson revealed in a letter to

1 In 1996, The CambridgeQuarterlypublished an F.R. Leavis Special Issue called"Reminiscences and Revaluations" as Vol. XXV, No. 4, on the occasion of the publicationof F.R. Leavis:A Life in Criticismby Ian MacKillop.


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GEORGE WATSON 233

the Guardian that "we compiled our own advertisements fordissection" in composing Culture and Environment (1933), laugh?ing together in Leavis' garden, as he later told me, as they did so.In other words, the evidences solemnly offered there of the decayof literary culture were an invention?though, as Thompsoncheerfully remarked in his published letter, "some of them havesince been quoted as genuine period pieces." That goes a greatdeal further than careless howlers like using a late, revised text ofHenry James to illustrate the excellence of James's early style.Leavis was as likely to compare a text or to verify a reference as hewas to think favorably of a colleague. But it was only in his lastyears that he was exposed as a fabricator.

In all this he was, in his own view, a justified sinner. Thehero-villain of James Hogg's novel Confessions of a Justified Sinner(1824) believed he has been justified by divine election to commitmurder. The Scottish novel was of course a critique of Calvinism.Leavis, who murdered reputations rather than people, had noreligion. Like his father before him, he was a high-mindedagnostic in the late Victorian style, though he once remarked tohis college chaplain, and with great emphasis, "I like religion,"meaning (no doubt) that he admired moral seriousness. His viewof the arts was wholly Victorian, too, a survival of the age ofGeorge Eliot and Matthew Arnold, above all in its claim to themoral authority of great literature. As Henry James once said ofRuskin's view of art, in the Atlantic Monthly (1878): "Instead of agarden of delight, he finds a sort of assize-court in permanentsession." That sums up Leavis' view to a nicety. He was the lastVictorian, and his self-appointed task as a critic was to keep thatview alive. Literature was to be the religion of a religionless age.As he would say, it was central.

So urgent a cause justified, one might easily come to think, a fibor two. There was a whole world to be saved, after all, and theminority culture of which he held himself to be the commandingspirit fully justified him,

in his own mind, in anything he did. Ifthe disciple had in fact shouted "Liar, liar" after him as he left theroom, he would have found his hide as impermeable as aSherman tank. He was the bearer of a great truth, and if for aninstant he forgot it there were always those about, notably his wife,to remind him of the fact. "India was going communist," heremarked once to a group of admirers, "and I sent some of my


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pupils out and they stopped it." He was never wrong, never at aloss. When an American Dickensian justly pointed out that theLeavises had falsely claimed, in Dickens the Novelist (1970), and indefiance of the published record, that they had always admiredDickens, a disciple was ready with an answer and a justification.Criticism to Leavis, he explained, like novel-writing to his idolD.H. Lawrence, was "the product of a savage pilgrimage" by whichever deeper truths about mankind are explored. If Dickens meantlittle to Leavis in the 1930s, then, that is simply because "hispreoccupations were elsewhere." But in the 1940s "Dickensbecame an increasingly powerful focus." That amazing apologiaappeared some years after Leavis' death, in The Sewanee Review inthe summer of 1985, and it is characteristically barefaced. Per?haps paranoia is the one form of mental illness to be infectious.Dickens did not matter in the 1930s to Leavis because he did notmatter?never mind why. Some years later Dickens matteredbecause?well, because he did. A savage pilgrimage is no place,evidently, to admit that you were once mistaken. So of courseLeavis was entitled to say he had always admired Dickens when,belatedly and with his wife's help, he came to write a whole bookabout him, even though it was not true and even though he andothers knew it was not true. Such are the ways of the savagepilgrim. One of Trollope's heroes, according to the title of thebook, knew he was right. Leavis, in spite of his many changes ofview, had an even more enviable gift. He knew he had never beenwrong.

His political views, in the sense of party affiliations, were neverprominent in his writings, and perhaps for that very reason havesometimes been misunderstood. He has been called a liberalcritic, though none of his more important writings date from thatshort period in the 1960s when, as an ex-socialist, he tentativelysupported the Liberal Party. Much of New Bearings was probablywritten before he was a socialist, but on present evidence thatcannot be established. In the 1930s he sat on a Cambridgecommittee representing various shades of left-wing opinion,including members of the Communist Party, and dedicated in thedays of university seats to electing a socialist to represent theuniversity in the House of Commons; but he never seems to havebeen a Marxist?rather a socialist in the English tradition of John


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GEORGE WATSON 235

Ruskin and William Morris. By his last years he was some sort ofconservative, but no friend of the Conservative Party, if onlybecause he hated economic growth, motorways and British mem?bership of the European common market; and he ended a longlife in bitter isolation, hating the modern world and all its works,a sort of Tory Green. His disciples might hold any view of publicaffairs or none, any religious view or none. So though he earnedfor himself the title of a social critic, he did so independently ofany lasting commitment, of a dedicated kind, to a party orchurch.The radicalism of his personality has perhaps been exagger?ated. An open shirt, tieless, is no more the mark of an iconoclastor of inferior social origin than of a gentleman taking his ease,and Lord David Cecil, an Oxford professor whose father was amarquess and grandfather a Tory prime minister, never seemedto me to dress any better. Leavis is reported, in a bitter exchangeat a faculty committee, to have demanded of a colleague who haddisagreed with him "the satisfaction of a gentleman," whichsounds terribly grand, especially since duelling has been illegalfor hundreds of years. Not that he was grand, though he tookpride in the belief that an ancestor was a seventeenth-centuryHuguenot duke. He was a man of the middle classes, rather richerthan most of his colleagues because of a commercially successfulfather; and though he derided the garden-suburb ethos, he livedall his life in just such a suburb, by choice, and in a series of villassuggestive of mounting affluence. His poverty, of

which he oftenspoke, seems to have been a self-induced illusion.

One could not be entirely certain how to place him. An earlycritic, one John L. Beevers, writing in the New English Weekly inApril 1934, when Scrutiny was only two years old, oddly thoughthim a fascist, or rather one who unwittingly aided Fascism: not"the shirted, full-blooded kind, with its programme of preliminaryviolence, its exaltation of the State and its progressive militarism,"but something altogether more dilute: "thin and watery and,although every bit as sentimental as the worst type of Fascism,. . .non-creative"?looking back to a rural England, but without "thevigor to create a programme or to evolve a creed," a passivereaction that never translated itself into action. That is thought-provoking, if not convincing. Perhaps there are some sharedsources here, along with Allen Tate and the Southern Agrarians


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of the 1930s in the American critical tradition. But Leavis wouldnever have marched to any drum. He was nostalgic for a pre-industrial England before it had been ruined by what he bitterlycalled technicologico-Benthamism: in short, he hated the IndustrialRevolution and its alleged cultural effects. Perhaps he was a Greenbefore the Greens ever thought of having a party. But if they hadhe would probably have found a reason for not joining it.

His style, which has often been denigrated, was an almostunique blend of the assertive and the evasive. The claims lookbold and large, but they often dwindle into the nebulous if youexamine them. A single instance will serve, and it is classic. Oneof his last books, D.H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955), a passionateeulogy, ends with a bitter attack on T.S. Eliot for having thoughttoo little of Lawrence, whose genius, Leavis concludes, "manifestsitself in an infallible centrality of judgement" with "an unfailinglysure sense of the difference between that which makes for life andthat which makes against it ..." That is impressively devious,when you think about it. Infallible, at first glance, might meanthat Lawrence was always right: an implausible claim, evidently,and one open to easy derision. But look again, and you will seethat it was not Lawrence's judgements that were infallible buttheir centrality. So what does central mean? The school of Scrutinyprided itself on its close reading of texts, or rather of all textsexcept the master's. You were banished if you asked such aquestion; and as for "that which makes for life," it would be seenas an open confession of insensitivity

toquestion

thephrase

at all.The last words of the book are darkly and richly gnomic:I speak as one who, when years ago Mr Eliot wrote in The Criterion ofthe frightful consequences that might have ensued if Lawrence 'hadbeen a don at Cambridge, "rotten and rotting others" ', was widelysupposed?at Cambridge, anyway, where it mattered?to share thehonor of the intention with Lawrence.

That is the sort of sentence that gave Leavis the reputation ofwriting badly. In fact it is a cleverly disguised boast of someimportance. At first reading it looks as if Eliot had attacked theyoung Leavis, all those years ago in the 1930s. Impressive, if so. Infact it merely claims that Eliot was "widely supposed" to have doneso, and it is not revealed whether the supposition was true or false.Cambridge mattered, no doubt, because Leavis lived and worked


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GEORGE WATSON 237

there. So though Eliot may not have done Leavis the signal honorof having thought him important enough to be attacked, theoutcome was much as if he had.

Such self-aggrandizing claims stand far beyond the reach ofevidence, which makes them look all the more adroit. How couldone disprove that people had thought Leavis the target of Eliot'sattack when they read The Criterion} By a subtle trick of suggestion,like an expert attorney, Leavis places himself in the line of victimsbeside his hero Lawrence and in the path of fire of the mostcelebrated critic of the age. It is not just the enormous presump?tion of the passage that leaves one gasping, but the skill by whichthat presumption is veiled. This was the one aspect of Leaviswhich in his lifetime was consistently underrated. He was a greatstylist. Those who thought him a potent thinker cursed bycrabbed diction missed the point altogether. It is doubtful if heever had much to say that was genuinely his own, and it isdoubtful whether, in a lifetime of writing, he ever added a particleto human knowledge. But he was artist enough with words toconvince thousands, for years and for decades, that he was afountain of irreplaceable truth.

By the last years the illusions had grown thick and menacing. Afew months before his death, in January 1978, when he became aCompanion of Honour, LA. Richards wrote to him, as I did, incongratulation. I had no reply, and expected none; Richards hadan unsigned one-sentence letter that read simply "We repudiatewith contempt any approach from you." In Mrs. Leavis' hand, itwas addressed by Leavis himself and delivered by hand, andRichards, on receiving it, was merely amused, but it leaves onenow with a blank sense of waste. A few months later Leavis wasdead, and his widow survived him by only three years. Contem?plating that unsigned letter which, like many of their writings,they must have composed together, one is left with the undyingimage of a self-tortured being, of an extravagant will reduced tomere tetchiness. It is hard to conceive of the mind that could takesatisfaction from such an act, and though it defies any attempt atjustification, some explanation must be attempted.

There are two aspects of Leavis' life which, being unpalatable,are seldom mentioned, and at the risk of seeming callous I shalloutline them briskly and in brief.


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One is that, from his middle years, he was afraid of his wife. Agood many people found her alarming, including myself, so thisis not a matter for conventional mockery. Leavis is reported tohave called her the embodiment of passionate will, which soundsright. A bitter woman, she had been profoundly disappointed bya lack of academic promotion and became increasingly jealous ofher husband's fame, and by her last years she appeared to take nopleasure in life except in the mortification of others. Of emi?nently Orthodox Jewish family in London, she had been expelledon marrying out and formally declared dead, and though themarriage was close and lifelong, its atmosphere was acrid. In hislast years Denys Thompson used to say it was rather like having acircular saw in the house. She did not nag him or have cause todo so, since his obedience was instant and unfailing. But shenagged at the world for what it had allegedly done (or failed todo) to him and to her?"And the editor didn't publish yourreply," she would say, and he would repeat obediently "And theeditor didn't publish my reply"?she forbade him his friends andeven his children, and she held open court to her unendingliterary and personal opinions. One simply had to listen or toleave. All that helps to explain something the world had no way ofunderstanding at the time, when Leavis in public sounded like afearless prophet. He was more like the Cowardly Lion in TheWizard ofOz. If you never win an argument at home, after all, youare bound to want to win one when you are out of the house. Afemale colleague who had brought up children once told me hereminded her of a small boy coming home from school withblood on his face, shouting, 'You should see the other guys."

The other truth, no less saddening, is that by his middle yearsLeavis was bored with literature.

Again, this is not a matter for mockery. In academic life it iscommon enough to lose interest by middle age, and perhaps oneshould be less surprised when it happens than when it does not.What presumption is there, after all, that an active and intelligentbeing should continue with the same interest for half a century?The dilemma can be painful and even insoluble. It is not usuallyeasy, or even possible, to change profession in one's forties, andyet the situation cries out for a displacement activity of some kind.Some academics go into administration, in which Leavis nevershowed the faintest ability or interest: in fact he was inclined, on


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a committee, to turn it into a literary seminar and, when thatfailed, to resign. Some try to make money, a life for which Leavishad neither aptitude nor inclination; some turn to pleasure.Leavis, who had no such options, turned to himself in the senseof cultivating his reputation and guarding it against rival critics bydestructive comment He became the keeper of the Leavis cult: acurious and perhaps unique religion in that its god was itsprophet and its prophet its priest. There could be no other godsbut he. Lionel Trilling could not be mentioned in his presence:he was a dangerous rival; Cambridge colleagues, if they were notevil, were buffoons; so was everybody else. "We doubt EdmundWilson's qualifications to talk about Dickens," he once told alecture-audience. "We doubt Edmund Wilson's qualifications totalk about any literature." The pontifical We suggests how far hehad left reality behind; the absence of argument how little, bythen, he cared for it. He was judge, jury and executioner.

But then he did not, by then, like books. If you spokeadmiringly of an author he would look contemptuous or, if thespeaker was his wife, fall into an embattled silence. His lectureswere about himself?imaginative recreations of a past life: how hehad been the first to notice that Henry James was a great novelistor T.S. Eliot a great poet, how lamentably the world had failed inthe due veneration of D.H. Lawrence, how a friend had betrayedhim or an editor traduced him and then allowed him no right ofreply. One early admirer, W.W. Robson of Oxford, once emergedfrom a meeting remarking scornfully: "He should have called itWhy I Am a Great Critic." Meanwhile the world had begun toblow the whistle on some of his claims. In The Buried Day (1960),C. Day Lewis, soon to be Poet Laureate, told how when he was anOxford freshman in the 1920s Maurice Bowra had "urged me toread The Waste Land at a time when, according to Dr Leavis, DrLeavis was the only teacher in any English university to haveacknowledged the genius of T.S. Eliot." It was difficult to avoid thevoice of Leavis in those postwar years: but did you have to believe it?

He was still a famous man, however exploded in reputation,and even in retirement he had to teach. Often, in those sad lastyears, at a loss for something to say, he would fall silent during hisown lectures. I once heard him read a short poem by WilliamBlake and then remark to his audience: "There is nothing to besaid about this, nothing." His classrooms were not empty only


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because he was celebrated, but those who came looked bored andglum. By the 1950s a volcano had turned extinct, and his visit toHarvard in the mid-1960s was accounted a disappointment, sincehe uttered no more than dull diatribes punctuated by bitterreflections about former friends and colleagues. Of the firsteditor of Scrutiny, for example, he remarked merely: "We gotmore out of him than he had."

When he died he left a shrinking band of disciples whose liveshad come to little, or litde he would have sanctioned. The declineof his influence began long before it was noticed outside Cam?bridge. Oxford, for example, had some committed if slightlyunorthodox admirers like F.W. Bateson and W.W. Robson as lateas the 1970s, which was long after Cambridge had ceased tointerest itself in the matter; and his reputation survived evenlonger in literary London and in some Commonwealth countrieslike India and Australia. I recall sitting in a Cambridge bar withLouis MacNeice in the early 1960s and failing to persuade him,fresh as he was from London and the BBC, that CambridgeEnglish was no longer seized with the spirit of Scrutiny. Londonreviews continued for years to assume that all things literary inCambridge revolved around him and his school, long after hisclaim that literature was the central discipline of academic lifehad come to look vainglorious and empty. In 1963 the CambridgeUniversity Press, still impressed by his name, reprinted Scrutiny intwenty volumes for a world market, with an index and anembarrassingly self-congratulatory Retrospect by Leavis himself.Somewhere he was read.

Ironical, perhaps, that London reviews and academic publish?ers should have kept his reputation alive for so long, since he hadalways believed that a sinister establishment of reviewers andpublishers had been the great adversary of his career. I neverheard him comment on any of the praise heaped upon him, inthose last years, by the journals, but then no praise was everenough, and he could sense a hostile qualification

ineveryphrase. He was in any case infatuated with an establishment of

another kind. Readers of Evelyn Waugh will call it Brideshead, orthe world of tided families. I do not know that the matter hasbeen mentioned in print, but the sober truth is that Leavis, by the1950s, was an ebullient name-dropper when it came to the rich,the famous and the aristocratic: "... invited to lunch by the


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vice-chancellor after my lecture?met Lord and Lady X, whoseemed very charming, very charming, then went to stay with myold pupil who is now director of ... . " His voice would rise inanimation as he relived his social triumphs: "All very delightful,very delightful, but rather tiring." Though money did not interesthim, the world of the monied did; the world of the titled stillmore.

The story ended before he did, but its epilogue was dramatic.In 1981 the pupil he had ardently wanted as a college successor,Morris Shapira, by then a lecturer in the University of Kent, wasmurdered at his home in Canterbury in a homosexual encounter.Like many disciples, he had written nothing. That is not surpris?ing. While the spell of Leavis lasted there was nothing to say, sinceLeavis had said it; and when the spell broke, or faded, there wasnothing to say for another reason, since it had been woven byLeavis and not by literature. Those who need exciting teaching inorder to think literature exciting, it hardly needs to be said, arethemselves unexcited by literature, so the outcome was bound tobe bitter. Just before she died his widow angrily protested that shehad written large chunks of his books herself, including the firstchapter of The Great Tradition (1948), and insisted that for yearsshe had been resenting her unacknowledged role. So there wasno peace for Leavis in the grave, or beyond it.

The rise and fall of the Scrutiny movement had best becontemplated in restrained and measured terms. Some havewished to see its collapse as confirming the death of humanism,or the claim that literature teaches how to live. Literature plainlydid not teach Leavis that, or his school, so the conclusion, rash asit is, was bound to be drawn. It would be more prudent, perhaps,though still not wholly reassuring, to draw a more limitedconclusion: that literature may not make you better, but tells youwhat you are.

The Messiah of Modernism_ F. R. Leavis (1895-1978)

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Transcript of The Messiah of Modernism_ F. R. Leavis (1895-1978)