One Unsparing Eye

Leavis (1895-1978) taught at Downing from the early 1930s until 1962; he wrote brilliant books like Revaluation (of poets, 1947) and The Great Tradition (of novelists, 1948), and, most important, he edited Scrutiny (1932-53), the indispensable quarterly of those decades. By 1964, though, David Holbrook, a left-oriented Leavisite, wondered if the campaign wasn’t over: “When I see old Leavis walking along Trumpington Street with a glazed look of denying the rest of the world on his face, then I recognize the dangers.” 

The dangers, that is, of disdaining the rest of the world’s pop culture, which that year saw hits like Mary Poppins and My Fair Lady in movies and John le Carré’s The Spy Who Came in from the Cold and Saul Bellow’s Herzog in fiction. The bag was mixed enough to invite some respectful attention. Still, the aim of criticism—what T. S. Eliot had called “the common pursuit of true judgment”—hadn’t changed. For a loyal Leavisite such as Holbrook, life was too short for “ ‘pop’-chasing.”

Ludwig Wittgenstein, Leavis’s friend at Cambridge, may have chased a little pop by going to the movies when he tired of the philosophical investigations that made him famous, but Leavis declined “intellectual slumming” of any sort. If he got winded, he put Schubert on the gramophone or read a neglected classic. We wonder which: He notoriously, and sensibly, insisted that some classics should be neglected—many titles in Robert M. Hutchins’s “Great Books” series, for instance, which sold by the crate along with sets of the Britannica. Not only would Leavis “never read them,” but, since they included such nonliterary tomes as Aquinas’s Summa Theologica and Hegel’s Philosophy of Right, it seemed safe to say that Hutchins himself hadn’t read most of them, either. 

To help students and self-improving adults, Leavis had to point to the great books that are essential, the products of the creative imagination—poems, plays, and novels—that had grown out of the living speech of the past and that, crucially, could contribute to the living speech of the present.

Actually, though, the speech of the present wasn’t very “living.” That diagnosis had begun to take root in the late 1920s, when, as Christopher Hilliard recounts in his finely researched, wide-ranging book, the English degree was established at Cambridge. I. A. Richards’s lectures in “practical criticism” revealed the subjective maunderings in students’ responses to poems they hadn’t seen before, by poets whose names were withheld. Blinkered by “stock responses,” students clearly didn’t know “how to read,” the phrase used by Ezra Pound in a 1931 pamphlet and echoed the next year by Leavis in How to Teach Reading. “Cambridge English” became synonymous with tactically delimited “close reading,” and, under Leavis’s inspiration, it could be distinguished from the New Criticism in America, with its seemingly inexhaustible attention to “the words on the page.” Leavis’s close readings were in the service of “sensibility,” notably the moral sense, and “value judgment,” assessing the play of words and sensibility in a given work and ranking it in relation to others.

Hilliard also covers the “culture and environment” concerns that preoccupied Leavis, Denys Thompson, L. C. Knights, and other early Scrutiny critics, whose students went on to found not just English programs but also media studies programs in British and Commonwealth universities. By “culture” Leavis meant something high—what, in mid-Victorian days, Matthew Arnold called “the best which has been thought and said.” By “environment” Leavis meant the modern conditions distracting the many from attending to culture—the “tradition”—and discouraging the few from creating worthy additions to it. 

The Scrutineers understood Eliot’s diagnosis of the peril that culture was in: If, wrote Eliot, “the natives of that unfortunate archipelago”—Melanesia—were “dying from pure boredom” because they had no felt connection to the “cinemas,” “gramophones,” and “motor cars” that modern civilization had imposed on them, the same could happen to people in the industrialized West, “when electrical ingenuity has made it possible for every child to hear its bed-time stories through a wireless receiver attached to both ears.” 

Tracing the origins of industrialization to the “dissociation of sensibility”—the separation of intellection and feeling—that Eliot perceived in the early 17th century, Leavis argued for the superiority of John Donne over John Milton, George Eliot over George Meredith, and D. H. Lawrence over James Joyce. These positionings didn’t derive from any specific “literary values.” They were “judgments about life”—the superior authors’ sensibilities being more unified than the competition’s.

Leavis could sound tiresome, in his final decades, when he would talk about how “ ‘life’ is a necessary word; life is concretely ‘there’ only in the living individual being,” and so on; but he was right. The state existed for the citizen, not the other way round. Abstractions were usually unhelpful when they weren’t simply meaningless. What counted were relations between individuals—and creative writers, having dramatized those relations, were our best guides to understanding the emotions and ideas animating the action. Only with such concrete understanding can moral discrimination become significant.

Leavis modeled teaching and writing in this spirit for, by Hilliard’s count, no fewer than 355 students who read (majored in) English at Downing from 1932 to 1952. The vast majority of them went on to careers in secondary education, though some worked at the red-brick or white-tile universities of Great Britain, at universities throughout the old empire, or in numerous outreach programs for nonacademic people, usually women, who socially and intellectually wanted to “read up.” Oxbridge proved impregnable to Leavisites, however, and Leavis himself, in his redoubt at Downing, was commonly scorned and persecuted by the genteel, often Bloomsbury-connected pooh-bahs at the older and richer Cambridge colleges. 

David Ellis’s marvelously engaging memoir relates that the career of a Leavisite could be lonely, especially with the rise of “theory” in the 1970s. Studying with Leavis just before his retirement, Ellis discovered that the opposition no longer consisted of philologists (Anglo-Saxon remained part of Oxford’s English degree to keep it from going “soft”), biographers tone-deaf to their subjects, or clever poem-crackers for whom analysis seemed an end in itself. The new theorists were initially structuralists (“What is the grammar of the language?”), then deconstructionists (“How can the text’s apparent meaning be flipped and shown to be something quite different?”), and, finally, under the aegis of cultural studies, ideologists (“Where does the text reveal the oppression based on gender, race, class, or sexual preference that’s made our history a nightmare from which we still haven’t awoken?”).

This politics-by-other-means cadre is currently in the saddle. 

Not that Ellis is against liberating the oppressed. It’s merely that “when a great novel or poem is used to support some generalization about culture, the qualities which make it worth reading tend to be ignored.” Granted, the Scrutiny critics could be said to have initiated cultural studies: Literary criticism, for them, quite naturally led to other areas of inquiry, such as history, religion, ethics, sociology, politics, and so on. Except Leavis insisted that two years of training in criticism had to come first. 

But how, as the precious Downing years receded, was a teacher to keep such training going? What Ellis found was that, lost between classes too large to supervise close reading and a civilization addicted to the hallucinations of pop, students and teachers alike preferred to skip directly to easy generalizations about fashion, sexuality, rap music, sports, performance art, or whatever. Ellis himself resisted the trend, but with difficulty.

He recalls the eyes of students at the University of Kent, where he spent most of his career, glazing over when he tried to convey the Elizabethans’ excitement at the opening of Henry IV Part Two, in which “a huge fat man trundled onto the stage followed by his tiny page” and demanded, “Sirrah, you giant, what says the doctor to my water?” It “must have brought the house down,” for the audience would have known Falstaff from part one of Henry IV and agreed that Rabelaisian jokes could be hilarious. The students, however, could see only “a dirty and intemperate old man.” This left “no more to be said,” as the sensibility on which an intelligent reading of Shakespeare depends had apparently vanished. 

A teacher in this situation can feel like a Nowhere Man, but he must remind himself that, with regard to the verities of the human condition, it’s really his students who are nowhere. And to get somewhere, they need introduction, through literature, to “feelings, attitudes, and thoughts which they [will] not otherwise” know. Shakespeare too hard? Try, say, Tennessee Williams (not worrying about Leavis’s probable contempt for him) and gradually—it’ll take a long time—move back to the Bard’s “dramatic poems.”

What are English departments up to these days? As ever, the largest number of students sit in composition classes, which try—with, as every white-collar employer knows, uneven results—to foster the ability to speak and write fluently about matters they don’t fully understand. It’s a “marketable” skill like any other. Literature (more truly, cultural studies) classes, for their part, are often skimming poems and stories—no need for them to be traditionally canonical—and extracting a few talking points about “there they go again” maleficence and “Yes We Can” hope. Fluency, assuming it’s been achieved, can be carried into any sort of symbolic-analytic work; what the professors are really banking on is that, wherever students go, the political takeaway—learning “diversity and tolerance through literature”—will stick.

When, in 1962, Leavis attacked C. P. Snow in the then-famous “two cultures” debate—the sciences vs. the humanities, principally literature—he quoted Snow’s statement about rapid industrialization in the Communist countries having proven how “common men can show extraordinary fortitude in chasing jam tomorrow.” The banality of “chasing jam” was proof, for Leavis, of an incapacity for serious reflection, or for writing fiction. Substitute “social justice” for “jam,” and you have today’s version of Snow’s position, which, in his late writings, Leavis labeled “technologico-Benthamism,” a utilitarianism dependent on science for the delivery of the greatest happiness to the greatest number. 

Despite Leavis’s nostalgia for a pre-industrial “organic community”—“the life of the Working Class” in Dickens’s England: how “they talked .  .  . they might die from typhus tomorrow, but they lived”—he realized that there was no going back, and he carried no brief against modern medicine, labor-saving machinery, or the opening of careers to all talents. His conviction was simply that the chances for English culture depended on something else: a continuity with the creative imagination’s most vital achievements in the past. The authority of religion having dwindled, the sole link to the past was through language (“they talked .  .  . they lived”), and we can get at that only through literature.

The Leavisites weren’t conspiring with England’s plutocrats, the 20th-century equivalents to Arnold’s “Barbarian” aristocrats; they were Arnold’s “clerisy,” an intellectual elite without whom (as Ellis says) we will get “a future in which the only way to decide questions of value would be by counting heads.” Great literature does, in principle, belong to all the “heads”—that was the breakthrough conviction of the students from lower-middle-class and working-class backgrounds who, starting in the Depression, found Leavis’s mode of criticism so bracing. But identifying and incorporating that literature is a matter not of voting but, again, of training. 

Students think they “like” sensationalist bestsellers. The Leavisite teacher is obliged to show them that they are “misinformed.” After all, the function of criticism is, along with Eliot’s pursuit of true judgment, “the correction of taste.”

Wittgenstein once told Leavis that “he had more character than intelligence.” 

Exactly. The source of character lies elsewhere.

Thomas L. Jeffers, who teaches English at Marquette, is the author of Norman Podhoretz: A Biography.