by Rick Gekoski
‘Quite interesting, thank you,’ he said mildly. I was quite pleased. I didn’t know that the English use ‘quite’ to mean ‘not particularly’, rather than the American usage, in which it is frequently used to add approving emphasis. I had a similar linguistic embarrassment, though with a better result, in attempting to join the varsity tennis ‘club’, which had a ‘secretary’, one Tony Billington, himself a member of the team. I dropped him a note, and by return received his suggestion that I have a game with a fresher called Ian Hewitt, who was ‘a useful player’. A few days later Ian and I had a match on grass, on which I had little experience, but rather enjoyed. I didn’t expect much from him, given that he was only ‘useful’, and I won relatively easily. I was immediately invited to join the varsity squad, and soon learned that Ian was a junior Wimbledon player, and played for Hampshire. ‘Useful’ meant ‘bloody good’. He eventually captained the team, and played First Singles in the Varsity Match. I played Sixth, and never took another set off him.
Two countries divided by a common language? It wasn’t just a question of different accent, usage and vocabulary – you could pick that up – but what was more complex, and harder to read, were the tonal differences between American English and English English. I’d never read anyone who wrote like Matthew Arnold, never encountered that curious mixture of playfulness and gravitas that make for his particular urbanity. Though committed to ‘the best that has been known and thought’ – to ‘culture’ – Arnold rarely has the earnestness that one finds in, say, Trilling; instead he is poised, playful, teasing, disarming potential opposition through the effortless felicity of his manner. Take the opening of Chapter 3 of Culture and Anarchy:
From a man without a philosophy no one can expect philosophical completeness. Therefore I may observe without shame, that in trying to get a distinct notion of our aristocratic, our middle, and our working class, with a view of testing the claims of each of these classes to become a centre of authority, I have omitted, I find, to complete the old-fashioned analysis which I had the fancy of applying...
Arnold’s views of the nature of ‘culture’, and its relation to England’s class structure, had been criticized as lacking in clarity and rigour, without an adequate basis in systematic reflection. He was also accused, again with some justification, of having too little regard for the alleviation of the suffering of the masses. His response to such criticism was invariably to smother his antagonist with approbation, and an apparent show of contrition:
While, finally, Mr Frederic Harrison, in a very good-tempered and witty satire, gets moved to an almost stern moral impatience, to behold, as he says, ‘Death, sin, cruelty stalk among us, filling their maws with innocence and youth,’ and me, in the midst of the general tribulation, handing out my pouncet-box.
I immediately suspected that Mr Arnold had the greatest contempt for Mr Harrison, whom he must have classed amongst his Philistines, and dismissed with a shrug and a smile. Quite the opposite: Arnold confessed to shrieking with laughter at Harrison’s parody of him, and his riposte has real fondness in it. Though he was given to playful teasing, and occasionally to ridicule, the sweetness and light that he recommends are most frequently encountered in his attitudes and in his style, as if the very mode and tonality of discourse established the truth of what he was saying.
One doesn’t, finally, learn much from Matthew Arnold. Understanding of particular poets is rarely enhanced by his readings, while his analysis of the English class system is crass, risible really. But none of this matters; you get inhabited by his voice, his temper and his tones. You enjoy Arnold because you are charmed by him, find his company instructive and congenial, and wish to recommend him as if he were a new friend. His distinctive and immediately recognizable voice is worth assimilating, his demeanour wholly his own. The key is that his terms are basically interchangeable: culture, sweetness, light, the best that has been known and thought, disinterestedness. Same thing, really. The style works by repetition of these terms and phrases until they have a certain inevitability, as if it were impossible not to think like this, using these concepts and ideas. His antipathy to systematic thinking was entirely congenial to me.
But if Arnold was greatly admired in Oxford, his major follower in the twentieth century, F.R. Leavis, certainly was not. This was no surprise to me, because I had never heard of F.R. Leavis, which occasioned as much astonishment amongst my tutors as my ignorance about the World Cup (which England had just won) caused amongst my fellow students. Was there no end to the cultural insularity of Americans? Leavis’s work was only occasionally discussed in Oxford, usually slightingly, but he was a potent, if absent, presence. He was consistently referred to, with a curious edge of contempt, as Dr Leavis. In Oxford, even wishing to have a doctorate (DPhil) was a symptom of self-aggrandizement and second-rateness, frequently to be found in Americans. Traditionally, a genuinely clever graduate was offered a college teaching post after getting a brilliant First; if insufficiently bright to achieve that, then a BLitt (a lesser thesis degree) was regarded as quite enough by way of research.
Leavis was not only one of those doctors, he taught at Cambridge, and there was – to the Oxford mind – something both unsavoury and unsound about him. He was an occasional speaker to Oxford societies, but his visits always had something clandestine about them: scheduled in obscure places at odd times like secret assignations, barely advertised, they seemed open only to the cognoscenti and the adventurous:Dr F.R. Leavis will be Speaking in the Under Crypt of Keble College. Time to be Announced. Leavis was, by our mild academic standards, dangerous. He seemed always to be arguing with someone, disparaging someone else. The Guardian’s obituary of Leavis, in 1978, put this squarely: ‘His most murderous and underestimated weapon was ridicule, which he deployed in lectures with the virtuosity of a music-hall star and with an insensitivity verging on paranoia.’ Had he chomped on one of his antagonists’ legs, no one would have been surprised. He was a bite waiting to happen.
He had a reputation for clannishness, and his students revered him with an intensity that was almost alarming. (No one felt this way about Hugo Dyson.) Though in print Leavis could be ponderous, in tutorials and lectures he was provocative, impish, and irreverent to an unexpected degree, even towards his most revered authors. T.S. Eliot, he was known to say, while pointing towards his groin, had ‘something missing in the cellar’, Milton was ‘as mechanical as a bricklayer’, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra were derided as ‘great babies’. This irreverence was wonderfully bracing, and left me, once I had heard the many stories about it, feeling freer to make personal judgements, and to be less guided by academic pieties.
It was particularly freeing with regard to Matthew Arnold, the occasion of my tutorial humiliation. I’d been caught in the pieties of practical criticism: a finished text is regarded as somehow perfected, and the job of the critic is exegetical, to show how the poem works. But some poems don’t. ‘To Marguerite’ palpably doesn’t: it’s rubbish, full of rotten poetic diction, and if you abandon the reflex of respect, you can use your critical tools to indicate why. There are very few really successful poems by Arnold, and it can be just as much fun dismantling the bad ones as explicating the good.
Leavis had learned from Arnold, and extended his lesson: instead of using single lines of poetry as touchstones – how silly! how limiting! – he used whole authors. How did this writer compare to the standards of serious engagement with life set by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence? And there is, surely, something both wrongheaded and something sensible here. Wrongheaded in the pedestrian sense that my essay for Dyson had located, but sensible in the obvious sense that in saying that something is good we inevitably imply ‘better than that, but not great, like this’. We are implicitly pointing, comparing, ranking in some implicit hierarchy.
Though his reputation for sour ferocity was not entirely unearned, when I actually began to read Leavis there was a great deal to admire and to learn from. If he generat
ed less sweetness than Arnold, there was, in compensation, rather more light. I was particularly taken by a marvellous essay called ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’ (from The Common Pursuit) in which Leavis puckishly reacts to a review of one of his books by René Wellek, whom he is delighted to label ‘a philosopher’, a category for which he has an amused contempt. (Actually Wellek was a seminal figure in ‘new criticism’, and wished to provide for it some theoretical ground.) Leavis uses him, as Arnold had used Mr Frederic Harrison, as a figure of fun: the grindingly theoretical practitioner, wholly lacking in tact, or as Leavis would have it, sensibility.
Wellek had requested that Leavis, before making his literary judgements, elucidate and defend the premises on which they were based. (C.S. Lewis has made a similar demand, accusing Leavis of smuggling in a value system, based on ‘relevance’ and ‘maturity’, which he was unwilling to state or defend.) But Wellek’s statement of this criticism is utterly pedestrian: Leavis has an implicit ‘norm’, he suggests, with which he judges every poet. ‘I would wish,’ said the exasperated Wellek, ‘that you had made your assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically.’ It might have been tempting to play skittles with such critical cack-handedness, but Leavis uses the occasion to make a subtle statement of his critical practice that became, for me, a sort of touchstone in itself.
Words in poetry invite us, not to ‘think about’ and judge, but to ‘feel into’ or ‘become’– to realise a complex experience that is given in the words . . . My whole effort was to work in terms of concrete judgements and particular analyses: ‘This – doesn’t it? – bears such a relation to that; this kind of thing – don’t you find it so? – wears better than that,’ etc.
Criticism, so viewed, is a communal search for shared – for ‘true’ – judgement. Critical assumptions are undoubtedly lurking somewhere in the background, which is where they should stay. Foolishly, Leavis almost immediately goes on, following this memorable statement about critical practice, to sketch his underlying belief:
traditions, or prevailing conventions or habits, that tend to cut poetry in general off from direct vulgar living and the actual, or to make it difficult for the poet to bring into poetry his most serious interests as an adult living in his own time, have a devitalizing effect.
This is so ponderous, so murky, so ill-framed, that it is no wonder that Leavis had resisted saying it: what is poetry in general? Why need living be described as vulgar? Whose actual life? A devitalizing effect on what, or whom? Raised in a middle-class Cambridge family, privately educated, and a university don for his entire life, his knowledge of the (vulgar?) working classes was derived largely from D.H. Lawrence, who couldn’t get away from them fast enough.
Leavis loved to provoke, and to provide something to argue against. He must have been scarily fun to study with, more stimulating for sure than the elegant and superior Dyson, with his lines of true poetry. But it was impossible for me, a twenty-two-year-old immigrant fresh from the distant shores of American suburbia, to make much of this: to navigate between the urbanity of Arnold and the ferocity of Leavis, to make anything substantial of these quintessentially English goings-on. Better to go back to the tennis courts, try to beat Ian Hewitt again, and confront the milder but still patronizing attitudes of a set of English public school boys: ‘you don’t pronounce it aristocrat, it’s aristocrat!’ At least I could tell them to go to hell, but I didn’t. I was too shy.
I wasn’t shy, though, with the girl in the downstairs flat on Bardwell Road. As I was leaving the building with my flat-mate Vijaya’s fiancée Dineli, just opening the door of the ground floor flat was a ravishing woman, who looked more like Julie Christie than Julie Christie did: fuller lips, slimmer, higher cheekbones. Her clothes – was she wearing a dress with black polka dots on a white background? – draped her with effortless grace.
I made an abrupt volte face, and knocked on the door. Barbara Pettifer, as she was called, answered immediately.
‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said, ‘but I have just moved in. Could you tell me where the rubbish bins are? I’ve looked everywhere.’
She told me. I introduced myself and Dineli, and made some ingratiating small talk, before we moved off, ostensibly in search of the bins.
‘I am going to marry that woman,’ I said.
Dineli laughed.
‘You’re crazy. What do you mean?’
‘I want to be able to tell this story to our children, about how I met their mother.’
‘You’re crazy!’
The next evening I knocked on Barbara’s door, mug in hand, to say that I lacked the ingredients for my cup of tea, so could I borrow a cup of water? She sighed but invited me in, boiled a kettle, and we had a companionable cuppa together. That weekend she came to our flat-warming party. (We’d bought a case of Mateus Rosé, and I was reprimanded by a friend who thought it ostentatious to serve ‘fine wine’ at a party.) Barbara arrived in a newly fashionable short skirt, greatly enhanced by a red garter belt which looked both saucy and demure simultaneously, had a few drinks and a dance, and talked captivatingly and intelligently about this and that.
The next Sunday morning she asked if I would like to go for a walk.
‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Where to?’
‘The Parks.’
‘What’s there?’
‘What do you mean? Trees, and the river. It’s lovely.’
‘What will we do there?’
‘You don’t do anything, you just go for a walk.’
What a romantic notion! I’d never gone for a walk before. I’d walked round golf courses, malls, campuses and cities, walked home from school or to the tennis club, but always in pursuit of some end. It had never occurred to me that you might do such a thing just for the sake of it.
It was quite pleasant, in a desultory sort of way. I kept looking for somewhere to have coffee, but it was just a park. Mildly disappointing really, save for Barbara’s good company. Like me, she’d only recently ended a serious relationship, and we shared details of the pain and loss. She had hastened to assure me from the very start that she had promised herself ‘never to liaise with another American’, her previous boyfriend having been (like me) an American post-graduate, a tennis blue, and the driver of a new sports car. (Sometimes on her way out to work in the morning – she was secretary to the principal probation officer of Oxford – she would give my blue Morgan a kick. ‘Bloody spoiled Americans,’ you could hear her thinking.) I had reassured her that it was far too early to consider ‘liaising’, and that my intentions were honourable. They weren’t. How could they be with a creature so luminously attractive?
As we strolled along, I was accosted by a hideous yappy dog, small and furious as a miniature Leavisite, who looked ever so keen to bite me on the ankle. His owner, a dowdy and upright dowager of the kind that have virtually occupied North Oxford, followed shortly.
‘You must excuse him,’ she said, ‘he’s very nervous.’
‘I’m nervous too,’ I said crossly, ‘and I haven’t tried to bite him.’
The lady glared, Barbara smiled, and we carried on.
8
FORMS OF LANGUAGE AND FORMS OF LIFE
Everybody’s life becomes more fabulous, every minute, than the most fabulous books. It’s phony, goddam it . . . but mysto . . . and after a while it starts to infect you, like an itch, the roseola.
Tom Wolfe, The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test
If a lion could talk, we could not understand him.
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations
I’d worked hard, and now it was time to have fun. I finished my BPhil exams in the early summer of 1968, and headed back to the States for a holiday, my head humming with passages from Matthew Arnold, Lewis Carroll, Arthur Conan Doyle, and other Victorian luminaries. It was then easy for me, over a short term, to memorize large chunks of text, and to use them where appropriate in exams. After the results were announced one of the examiners asked me, with a mix
ture of incredulity and respect, whether I had a photographic memory. I did, sort of – I could actually see chunks of text and inwardly read them – but the photographs faded quickly, so that by the time summer had blossomed, and the muggy Long Island heat set in, I could hardly recall more than occasional phrases. I was glad of it, because Matthew Arnold didn’t go down very well in that second summer of love.
It is a major premise of Culture and Anarchy that a belief in ‘the prime right and blessedness of doing as one likes’ was the besetting error of Victorian liberalism, and that this disposition towards the merely personal had to be combated by the full force of culture. One must follow what ‘right reason’ and disinterestedness ordain, or else anarchy would surely prevail. And in that drug-hazed musical summer it did. It was great, ‘doing your own thing’, unswayed by the force of Arnold’s hundred-year-old disapproval.
I lounged about smoking dope, reading book after book, listening to Dylan’s ‘Blonde on Blonde’, Jefferson Airplane, the Grateful Dead and Country Joe and the Fish, who did a gig on Long Island that summer. We drove to it down the Expressway passing a joint back and forth through the window, at sixty miles an hour, with the amiable folks in a car in the adjoining lane.
Best of all was the Doors, whose song ‘The End’, while palpably about death, was also a metaphor for entry into a new way of being. In 1967 the group had appeared live on the show of the ghoulish and shockingly talentless Ed Sullivan, an accolade also offered to the Rolling Stones, having been firmly instructed to alter the line ‘Girl we couldn’t get much higher’, from ‘Light My Fire’, lest it suggest – gosh! – indulging in drugs. Jim Morrison sang it anyway – unlike Mick Jagger, who had agreed to change ‘let’s spend the night together’ to ‘let’s spend some time together’. Sullivan was furious, and vowed that the Doors would never return. They didn’t want to anyway. Presumably the Stones did.