F. R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism 0312163576, 9780312163570

Citation preview

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LEAVIS WAS UNDENIABLY ONE OF the great thinkers of the twentieth

•

work on

century. His

literature exerted a pro-

found and lasting influence on the teaching ijU;

'

'*

'

•

'

•

' .

.

The

of English throughout the world. his

life,

as

story of

recounted by Ian MacKillop,

was one of Leavis’s students,

who

therefore a

is

chronicle of the development of the study of

modern

literature.

When '

*v

•

Cambridge

R. Leavis arrived at

F.

.

V

.

World War, there was no

just after the First

separate faculty of English, but within a few

was established and Leavis became

years one

young team lecturing

part of the

new

MacKillop charts the influences on

subject.

and work, from

Leavis’s life to T. S. Eliot

Leavis’s C. P.

in the

I.

A. Richards

and William Empson. He chronicles

famous public disagreement with

Snow

in the

Two Cultures

Debate; dis-

cusses the genesis and publication of Leavis’s

books; and looks

at the

development of both

the influential magazine Scrutiny and the School of English Studies

at

Downing College.

Leavis’s views, although based

on profoundly

personal beliefs, were radical and combative.

He and his provocative wife, Queenie Leavis, were never above the inside the walls of

fray of battles

waged

Cambridge University.

MacKillop paints an unforgettable picture of English village

life

tea, cloistered

of high

in great detail.

private

know

as

life

he chronicles walks and

By adding

F.

R. Leavis:

A

world

bitter rivalries

details of Leavis’s

to the public persona

well,

this

most people

Life in Criticism

becomes one of the most revealing

intellectual

biographies of the late twentieth century. •

’

\

For

ft

*

note on the author, pirate ter the hack flap.

Digitized by the Internet Archive in

2017 with funding from

Kahle/Austin Foundation

https://archive.org/details/frleavislifeincrOOmack

F.R. LEAVIS: A

Life in Criticism

Robert Austin’s drawing of F.R.

men of letters

in the

Leavis,

one of the pictures of leading

Bookman Christmas ,

1934.

Ian MacKillop

F.R. LEAVIS A Life in Criticism

ST.

MARTIN’S PRESS

NEW YORK ft

f.r. LEAVIS:

A

life in criticism.

rights reserved. Printed in the

may be used

Copyright

United

States

©

Ian MacKillop, 1995, 1997. All

of America.

No

part

of this book

or reproduced in any

manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of brief quotations embodied in critical articles or reviews. For information, address St. Martin's Press, Scholarly and Reference Division, 175 Fifth Avenue,

New York,

N.Y. 10010

ISBN 0-312-16357-6 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

MacKillop, I.D. (Ian Duncan) F.R. Leavis p.

:

a life in criticism / Ian

MacKillop.

cm.

Originally published:

London

:

Allen Lane

The Penguin

Press

1995.

ISBN 0-312-16357-6 1.

Leavis, F.R. (Frank

Raymond), 1895-

English literature— Study and teaching— England— Cambridge— History— 20th .

2.

century. 3. English literature— History and criticism— Theory, etc.

Cambridge (England)-Intellectual life — 20th century. 5. English teachers-England-Cambridge— Biography. 6. Criticism— England4.

-History I.

20th century.

7.

Critics

— Great Britain — Biography

Title.

PR55.L43M32

1997

801’.95’092 [BJ

— DC21

96-45528

CIP First

published in 1995 by the Penguin

First St. Martin's edition: April,

10

987654321

1997

Group

To

the

memory of Maurice B. Kinch

13 July ig28 to 14 February igg3

Is

not the pastness of the past the profounder, the completer,

the it

more

legendary, the

more immediately before

the present

falls?

— Thomas Mann, The Magic Mountain

‘Art in the blood

is

liable to take the strangest forms.’

— Arthur Conan Doyle, ‘The Greek

Interpreter’,

The Memoirs of Sherlock Holmes

Contents

List of Illustrations

xiii

Preface

xv

PROLOGUE:

1961

The

Portrait

The

Secret Sharers

Being

3

10

a Critic

13

PART ONE

Culture and Environment

1895-1931

CHAPTER ONE ORIGINS 1895-1919 Into the City 1895-1910

Sixth

War

Form

at the Perse,

25

Freshman

at

Emmanuel 1910— 1915

1915-1919

32 38

CHAPTER TWO ENGLISH AT CAMBRIDGE 1919-1924 Return

to

Cambridge 1919

The Original ‘Cambridge

English’ 1919—1926

48 51

Undergraduate and Postgraduate 1919-1924

68

Matters of Feeling: Forbes and Richards

74

1

CONTENTS

CHAPTER THREE EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I Freelance 1925-1926

79

Modernism and Lectures 1927-1928

95

Precarious

Terms 1928— 1929

100

Poet-as-Leader, Minority Culture 1931

1 1

Doing Criticism

119

PART TWO Stage Army

193

1

1931-1948

CHAPTER FOUR WE WERE CAMBRIDGE I93I-I932 ‘I’m faced with a void’ 1931

127

Pioneer Performances 1932

135

The Year of Scrutiny 1932

142

CHAPTER FIVE ‘to

downing college’

A New

1931-1937

College 1931-1936

Downing

English 193 1— 1936

151

161

Lea vis’s History 1936

170

Milton and Shakespeare 1937

174

Incipient Corruption? 1937

177

Wild, Untutored Phoenix 1937

183

CHAPTER SIX SCRUTINY GUARDING THE GUARDIANS I932-I937 I

Guardians: Empson, Pound, Lawrence 1932—1933

185

Attack from Bloomsbury-by-the-Cam 1933

195

Leaving Richards 1934

198

11

CONTENTS Primers and Propaganda 1932-1934

207

Sensuous Experience: Joyce, Milton, Eliot 1933-19 36

21

Poets 1933-1937

217

CHAPTER SEVEN

WARTIME I938-I948 Emergency 1938-1944

Non

Persona

221

Grata: Leavis’s Occupation 1939-1947

225

Old Cambridge 1939-1947

228

Education: Ideal and Actual 1940-1943

232

Language and Tragedy 1944 New Bearings on English Fiction 1945-1948

248

PART THREE After the War

251

1949-1963

CHAPTER EIGHT

NO COMMON PURSUIT 1949-1960 Function of Criticism 1949-1952 Virtue in

Our Time

263

1950

269

Bloomsbury Again: Damned Flumbug 1949— 1951 The End of Scrutiny 1949-1953

272

Lawrence 1949-1955

284

Helpers 1955-1960

291

279

CHAPTER NINE the sixties: orthodoxy of enlightenment 1960-1963 Approaching Retirement 1960-1962

301

Lady Chatterley and History 1960-1962

304

Richmond Lecture 1959-1961 Snow 1962-1963

Before the

3

Against

314

Retirement 1962-1963

1

325

\

CONTENTS

PART FOUR

New

Ships 1963-1975

CHAPTER TEN THE END OF CAMBRIDGE 1 963— 1965 University Expansion 1963—1964

333

Succession Crisis 1964-1965

34°

Coterie Rejected

35°

Leaving Cambridge

360

CHAPTER ELEVEN

NEW

UNIVERSITIES 1965-1975

York and Elsewhere 1965—1970

364

Dickens 1970

3^9

Field-performances 1969—1971

374

Liaison 1970-1974

3

Thought and Memory: Wittgenstein, Montale I973 _I 975

3^9

PART FIVE Epilogue Still

84

1975-1978

Writing

The End

4°3

4°d

Acknowledgements

4U

Abbreviations

4 *5

Notes

417

Books and Pamphlets by F.R. Leavis

446

Index

449

List of Illustrations

Frontispiece:

leading

men

Robert Austin’s drawing of

tion,

illustrations

of

Moore

Leavis’s father (by courtesy of Kate Leavis)

Leavis, F.R. Leavis’s

Cambridgeshire Libraries

The

one of the

of letters, Bookman, Christmas 1934 (National Portrait Gallery)

Harry Leavis, F.R. Kate Sarah

Leavis,

&

mother (Cambridgeshire Collection,

Heritage Service)

Leavis piano business, opposite

Cambridgeshire Libraries

&

Downing

College (Cambridgeshire Collec-

Heritage Service)

Leavis at the Perse School (by courtesy of Kate Leavis) Leavis in the Friends’

Ambulance Unit (by courtesy of Kate

Queenie Dorothy Roth during her

Leavis)

Cambridge, October 1925 (The Mistress and Fellows of Girton College, Cambridge) first

term

at

Queenie Leavis with her son Ralph, aged one, January 1935 (by courtesy of Kate Leavis) F.R. Leavis with Ralph, January 1935 (by courtesy of Kate Leavis)

The

Leavis family

home

in

Chesterton Hall Crescent (by courtesy of Kate

Leavis) I.

A. Richards (by courtesy of Kate Leavis)

Manus Bewley

(by courtesy of Peter Dewes)

Queenie Leavis, Harold Mason, Kate and Robin Leavis (by courtesy of

S.

Betsky-Zweig) Morris Shapira (by courtesy of Peter Sharrock) F.R. and Queenie Leavis on the steps of West Lodge,

summer

Downing

College,

1961 (by courtesy of Robert Fothergill)

F.R. Leavis papers Ltd)

in

Bulstrode Gardens,

November

1976 (John Cleave/Times

News-

LIST OF

Text p.55 Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch,

December

ILLUSTRATIONS

Illustrations

drawn by H.M. Brock

for

The Granta

1923

A. Richards, drawn by Alistair

p.64

I.

p.66

E.M.W.

Tillyard as seen

Cooke

by The Granta

for in

The Granta

June 1928

in

February 1929

Preface

The aim of

Raymond

book

this

who,

Leavis, a writer

name’. So has

like

Tennyson’s Ulysses, has ‘become

a

wife and collaborator, Queenie Dorothy Leavis. In the

his

course of writing

have focused

on display the long career of Frank

to set

is

it

my

specifically

admiration for Q.D. Leavis has grown, but

on F.R. Leavis, partly

in

order to counteract

trend towards the melding of his identity with hers into

I

a

concept,

a joint

‘The Leavises’. For the

life

bibliography

volumes of

of F.R. Leavis there

(see

below) runs to over

his letters,

a

is

mass of material: the published

hundred pages. There

five

and those of Q.D. Leavis, to the

are

two

press, Letters in

by John Tasker, and More Letters in Criticism have used (1992), edited and privately published by Maurice Kinch. these sources and also studied much, but certainly not all, of his correCriticism

(1974), edited

I

spondence. Leavis wrote something like half

compulsory

‘in

hilariously

haste’, as

scornful

he called

dozen

day, often

letters a

sometimes generous, sometimes

of the ‘major pachyderms’, sometimes obsessed,

rarely dull. Besides letters supplied I

it,

a

have used the main collections

Downing and Emmanuel

by

at the

Colleges,

his

correspondents (noted below),

University of Texas

Cambridge,

the

at

Austin, at

at

Brotherton

Library, University of Leeds, and at the University of Reading, which has the care of the publishing papers of Chatto tain

evidence of

all

&

Windus;

Leavis’s relations with his publisher

these con-

from the

early

1930s to the 1970s. Other collections exist in private hands, including

and

L.C. Knights, Harold

Mason and John

family

letters,

Speirs.

Apart from written sources, an oral tradition survives:

letters

to

1

have

had the benefit of a wealth of reminiscence.

Many

people have helped me,

in

person and

especially several generations of Leavis’s pupils at

in

correspondence,

Downing

College,

Cambridge, and former students of other colleges and institutions. have made of their hope they will not be exasperated by the use I

I

PREFACE

XVI

who

Those

testimonies.

me

have allowed

study and reproduce

to

substantial material in their possession are listed in the

ments

at the

end of

who

book. Here

this

I

would

Acknowledgeout other

like to single

three:

me advice, data or inspiration, sometimes all Marie Addyman, Tim Armstrong, Sir David Attenborough,

Sarah

Bendall,

individuals

have given

Sarah

Betsky-Zweig, T.A.B.

Birrell,

Derek Brewer,

Glen Cavaliero, Graham Chainey, Rupert Christiansen, Stefan Collini, Alistair Cooke, Hazel Eagle, David Hamilton Eddy, H.L. Elvin, D.J.

Nancy

Gwendolen Freeman, Marjorie Glick, Jean Gooder, Richard Gooder, Damian Grant, Ronald Gray, Simon Gray, Enright,

Fraser,

George Greenfield, Norman Guilding, Ian Hamilton, Bernard Harrison, A.D. Harvey, John Harvey, Ronald Hayman, Norman Henfrey, Colin Hill, John Holloway, Father P.C. Hunting, George Hyde, Fred Inglis, Peter Jackson,

Howard

Jacobson, Susan

M.

Jarratt,

Robert

Jefford,

Arthur Johnston, Peggy Kinch, G. Klingopulos, L.C. Knights, William

Roger Louis, Duncan McCallum, Fiona MacCarthy, Carla MacKillop, Edward MacKillop, James MacKillop, Alistair McLeery, David Matthews, Wilfrid Mellers, Karl Miller,

pher Parry, Roger Poole,

Howard

Mills,

Lord Morris, Christo-

Gorley Putt, Clare

S.

Ratliff,

Theodore

Redpath, Neil Roberts, Colin Roth, G.H.W. Rylands, Rosalin Sadler, G.S. Singh, Sir Stephen Spender, Geoffrey Strickland, Frank Stubbings,

Kevin Taylor, Etain Todds

John Vice, Iris Walkland, Geoffrey Walton, Garry Watson, Frank Whitehead, Charles Winder and Michael Yudkin. (nee

Kabraji),

have had the good fortune to receive funds or privileges from the British Academy, the Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center at I

the University of Texas at Austin, Clare Hall,

University of Sheffield.

At Penguin Books

I

Cambridge, and the have had continuous,

imaginative support from Clare Alexander, Judith Flanders and especially Paul Keegan. The expert reading and copyediting of Donna Poppy has

improved every inch of

for the care I

am

this

and subtlety shown

book.

in his

I

am

indebted to David

work on

Bowron

the index.

indebted to the consideration of the literary executors of F.R.

Leavis (Robin Leavis and G.S. Singh) and the help of Kate Leavis for

me

furnishing

with family photographs - but

it

must be

stressed that

representatives of the Leavis family are not responsible for ‘authorizing’ this

book.

I

am

Charles Page, Alison Platt yielding

many

Roger Gard, Patrick Harrison, and Richard Storer for work on my drafts,

grateful to Michael Black,

suggestions and the discovery of innumerable errors.

PREFACE Specialist librarians

XVII

and archivists have been particularly helpful, nota-

(Emmanuel College); Michael Bott (University of Reading); Graham Dalling (Edmonton Green Library); Cathy Hender-

bly Sarah Bendall

son (Harry

of

Bristol);

Ransom Humanities Research

Center); Nick Lee (University

David McKitterick (Wren Library, Trinity College, Cam-

some Cambridge University Press manu(Downing College); Kate Perry (Girton College);

bridge, temporarily housing

Paul Millett

scripts);

Mike

Petty (Cambridge City Libraries: Cambridgeshire Collection); and

Christopher Stevenson (University of Leeds). I

wish to express

my

appreciation of the help of Rosie Ford, and of

the late Maurice Kinch, joint author (with William Baker and

Kimber) of F.R. Leavis and Q.D. published by Garland Publishing,

Leavis:

An

John

Annotated Bibliography,

Inc., in 1989, originally

William Baker with the encouragement of Q.D. Leavis.

conceived by

A

formidable

amount of research and editing was undertaken by Maurice Kinch. Without this work, his other publications and his personal assistance and would have liked hospitality, my book could not have been attempted. I

the finished article to be subjected to his compassionate severity. Finally, a note

on nomenclature. The writing of

persons called ‘Leavis’ (both, actually, ‘Dr Leavis’)

an author

names. works.

I

who

feels

book about two presents a problem to a

uncomfortable with the familiar usage of

decided mostly to use ‘Leavis’, ‘F.R.L.’ and ‘Q.D.L.’.

their first I

think

it

F.R. LEAVIS:

A

Life in Criticism

Prologue 1961

Back

in

England, Wordsworth eludes for

a

while the close confident

knowledge aspired to by the modem biographer. - F.R. Leavis, ‘Wordsworth: The Creative Conditions’, 1971 John

Forster,

friendship

with

his intimate personal

knowledge of

which survived storms), gives

biographer does or

now

us the sense, as

no other

same room

Dickens,

can, of being in the

and even, more important, of being

his friend (a

really

as

inward with Dickens’s

make

personality and character, and without being concerned to

out

a case

by

‘interpreting’ his subject.

— F.R. and Q.D.

Leavis

on John

Forster’s

The

Life of Charles Dickens

from Dickens

The

the Novelist

,

1970

Portrait

F.R. Leavis died on 14 April 1978. Nearly twenty years later, at the centenary of his birth, he is often mentioned, but not widely or carefully read. it

The

case

was

was not only

between the mid- 1930s and 1970s, and then writings that were current. The critic, whose

different his

thinking focused on an idea of ‘impersonality’, was

known

for a personal

presence, appropriate for an indefatigable teacher.

The purpose of this Prologue in

1961, using the report of

end of his

official career at

is

one

to

evoke

this

who watched

presence

at

one moment

Leavis closely near the

Cambridge. As he approached retirement, the

Governing Body of Downing College, where Leavis was a fellow, arranged for his portrait to be painted. He would have liked the artist to be Lawrence Gowing, but he was pleased with the choice of Peter

Greenham, who knew his family slightly. Leavis found Greenham a cordial companion during the thirty or forty hours of sitting that the painter required. Greenham was absorbed by Leavis’s company, painting

PROLOGUE

4

and over-painting

he feared the picture would be too dark for the

until

‘You look

college Hall.

different

from every point of view,’ he

should have thought everybody did,’ replied Leavis.

when

Leavis quite liked the painting

he looked too benign in

Downing and

would

said the college

dingy corner. There, perhaps on

‘I

1

was done, though he considered

few years he was

In a

it.

it

said.

have

its

‘E’ staircase,

it

best

new

to

fall

out with

hung could accompany picture

in a

the

visages of long-forgotten college notorieties (‘like Perkins’), with the

exorcized inscribed below. A passer-by would not have thought the Greenham portrait particularly diabolic. 2 He depicted a legend

man, unlike the austere Leavis of popular imagination. At date Leavis had hardly ever been drawn or photographed for the

lively, hesitant

that

When the portrait was exhibited at May 1962, people were surprised.

Royal Academy exhibition

press.

the

in

Evelyn

Waugh remarked

to

Greenham that he had actually made Leavis ‘look intelligent Peter Greenham died in 1992. Not long before his death he made ’.

notes about his experience of the sittings with excellent

introduction to the

manner, which matters for

Greenham shows what

poem It

who made

which he wrote

in the

room the

Dickens’.

as

same room

When

Greenham

certainly

Leavis, he

heaving with jewellery ... he

many of my own table,

(I

sat

tastes, that

though

said,

the head of this

at

of ‘being

was

it

but

said,

below me.

In those days

No —

you don

t,

‘There was

a

time

novels.’ In the afternoon Leavis

he read

James

a

same

in the like to

be

in

to like Dickens, especially the

to the high

I

the titled

life,

I

said boldly,

I

‘I

like

passage from

it,

Downing

smoked one

College.

says about the novels ot

I

sat

on

a

cigarette after another,

smoke or the ash.) He was so courteous that went on to say, ‘Well, I used to like sonte of I

still

when thought liked one or two of sat down with a book under his arm. I

then shut

bosoms

Arnold Bennett’s

Bennett’s novels,’ and was rebutted with a stern ‘No, Greenham.’ it,

who

‘No, no!’ All the same, he confirmed so

one morning

but he never complained about the said,

neglected essay.

a

was probably she

shows what

used to paint Leavis in the dining hall of

and he

when he

a sense

was beginning

early chapters of Dornbey and Son,

novels.

it

Thomas Hardy’s

as Leavis.

was painting

I

study in

John Forster

of Dickens gives

his life

a

wings, so to speak;

located and quoted the remark about

Prologue - that

such personal impact.

Leavis liked to quote, notably

‘Alter a Journey’, of

evokes Q.D. Leavis

and teacher. They give Leavis’s

critic

writer

a

they are an

Leavis;

it

with

I

a

bang and

Arnold Bennett, and

said, I

‘

That

think

is

you

stuck to

Bennett’s Presently

what Henry will agree,

THE PORTRAIT Greenham,

it is

final.'

But

wasn’t, for

it

still

I

5

love to read Riceyman Steps and ,

Leavis spoke later, if only in a footnote, of the ‘shared quality of

—

experience’

may have

I

wrong —

got the words

to be

found

in

human

Bennett.

It

an indication of the loyalty which Leavis attracted that on the one or occasions

repeated the incident,

I

end

(after

he died)

and

said

it

was

had

less

I

to

I

go

I

thought

I

had betrayed

wrote to Queenie and told her the

memoir. Did she ever

into the

luck with Kipling. But he did

complained that Forster had been unjust to one

his confidence. In the

story.

She was delighted

who had

about an Indian

of people

set

A

in

Passage

‘You mean the Mohammedans?’ ‘No.’ ‘The Hindus?’ ‘No.’ ‘The

India.

‘No —

the English.’

There was

a

more than

to

Parsees?’

He Master of Downing much

touch of the ‘bull-dog breed’ about him.

who had

seemed to respect the admiral

two

live to write it?

me

tell

was

been the

when

the current Master: and once

came

a stray Alsatian

to the

window, Leavis (who used to feed it with scraps) said ferociously, ‘Is he going to worry the Master’s thin shanks?’ He spoke with similar ferocity of other dons, and, of course, of C.P. Snow, about whom he used words I saw again in the famous pamphlet a few months later [in February 1962]. Sometimes he spoke more to himself than to me. remember that he told me a publisher had asked him to bring out a selection of Hardy’s poems, the best ones, but he said he couldn’t. Often, in a low voice, he would say over the dining-hall

I

poem

that begins ‘Hereto

I

come

to

view

a voiceless ghost.’*

He had

a

smile of

extraordinary sweetness.

He was not ‘a man of the world’. He would tell me how much he had in the bank, why his wife wouldn’t let him keep a dog, and of his visits (getting by heart a Shakespeare sonnet in the waiting room at Bletchley) to his son Ralph, of whom he spoke sadly yet proudly. One day he asked me if he could have a no more,

glance,

at the portrait, so that

he could

tell his

wife he had seen

it.

She

wanted news of it.

He

often spoke of his admiration for Augustus John’s portrait of

Hardy, of

Shaw

for

its

its

majestic subtlety; and he admired the

‘exposure of a charlatan’.

warmth -

he spoke of with Girl’. It struck

me

tomed

in

to

meet

was pleased So

I

never

* Hardy’s ‘After records at

my

dining

late

a

Eliot hall,

it

was

his

portrait

of Bernard

painting in the Fitzwilliam that

favounte - was Pissarro’s ‘Farm

much surer taste commonly military,

had

sitters,

George

that

sat in that

He was

that he

think

I

The other

John

Thomas

a

in paintings

than

I

am

episcopalian or academic.

and waited for him sat

still;

to enter quickly,

the most courteous of

and quietly.

sitters,

Journey’. Leavis’s distinctive speaking voice was often noted.

Caversham give an expert view

somewhat monotonous and

He

wrote warmly of Rubens.

and always

September 1949: ‘Quiet, rather

accus-

flat

pleasant.’

in the report

of

a

much

BBC

producer, R.E. Keen, on 20

voice with East Anglian vowels, which sounds

PROLOGUE

6

ashamed of cousin of

interruptions, especially

Henry James.

had asked us

everything.’

my

did

I

best

magnificent face,

done any

justice.

ordinary men,

when he

A

me

asked

a

— jam

me

the cakes

were not

eaten.

count upon you to eat

I

sandwiches, fruit cake.

tarts,

to give a paper to a

would

me

an impression on

too.

fail

group of

make from

a different

sunny dusty

in the

his pupils

I

hall that

thought that

if

room and remarked,

I

was

I

next morning, Leavis walked

at breakfast

men enjoyed

‘Well, the

So when he asked

it.’

on ‘Drawing’ with

to give another talk, this time

I

had written about twelve pages on the

I

but, noticing Leavis sitting with his eyes shut,

skipped page after page. While into the

a

that the college butler

small tense body; the air of being of

D.H. Lawrence,

paintings of

if

claimed to be

noble expression, to which no photograph has ever

made such

all

the portrait

failed

and would be hurt

never eat anything, Greenham, so

I

me

another occasion, he told

to tea in his pantry,

‘You know

A

On

who

one by an American

slides,

prepared to observe Leavis, Queenie and their daughter

was not un-

I

sitting

all

with their

eyes shut.

more than any other sitter, of making a sitting not merely an occasion, but something exalted. Whether he was reciting a poem in a voice hardly audible, or remembering men he admired such as Wittgenstein, or, in an amused but affectionate way, Quiller-Couch, or mocking his enemies (with a sandalled jerking foot, as if about to kick them). His voice was low yet

He had

the effect, almost

excited (and not in any

Though he looked of the respect of

that,

attached to

him

as far as

now -

told

me

it

that his father

pleasure

Sir Leicester

He was off

Not every

was

for the Boers in 1900;

sitter

And

does

the

in

yet there

gentleman which

I

he didn’t speak

tanned by the sun; a

white

which

shirt

dropped one of

my

so!

and he used to

War who

was something

echoed

is

by

When

up.

intimidated by the English officers. a

(set

glow.

a russet

of the Australian soldiers

spoke of the tradition of

this portrait’),

can remember.

together with the colour of his clothes

brushes, he stooped to pick

special

radio).

men of sixty-seven, and sometimes spoke

(‘and

I

looked fresh every day), gave him

He

on the

like his voice

older than most

coming retirement

his

and

now

way

in

tell

with

refused

to

be

in the

way

he

what he writes about

Dedlock, and the training of merchant seamen

in the essay

on The

Shadow-Line. All this

is

known, perhaps - what

I

think you

want from me

had on me. Most courteous, tormented, kind, never

blow Europe torrent, a

no

to pieces.’ His

outlet.

the effect he

He once

of the power of the atom bomb. There’s enough energy in

talk

am

trivial.

is

‘They

said,

my

wife to

was another kind of energy: suppressed, but

Once, when he was describing somebody to me, he

like a

said,

‘I

novelist manque.'

He had one of

the

most impressive heads

Einstein and Paderewski, both of

whom

I

I

have ever

saw

seen: to

in the street in

compare with

Oxford.

I

wish

THE PORTRAIT Epstein could have done a bust of

might have been

that the sittings

Greenham wrote

to

memoir

aging her with the

things that only he and

not getting do, and

I

right.

it

wanted Leavis

she

life,

would

which would give

remember

husband’s death in 1978, encour-

my own work -

a

drawer for her

When

of anyone

there’s so in

much

to

bereavement

memoir

did

not

She certainly

notes.

can’t people check with the

one of her Girton contemporaries pleasure

‘great

else

she encountered a howler about

‘Why

expostulate,

cences,

solicited

3

understandably the

health;

family?’

a letter to say

.

Q.D.L. was seriously depressed

4

She

but were not

me

can’t bear to think

I

there’s

to set the record straight.

s

Later he wrote to

trial,

after her

though she kept

materialize,

.

she planned to write. She replied, ‘There are

But then poor

in

.

knew, and

I

m seventy-one.’

and had been

.

sorry

a

Q.D.L.

him

7

to

my

for reminis-

who

children

can

worn down with battling for fact can hardly remember myself

us only as grey-haired and

survival in a hostile

environment -

in

I

we (F.R.L. and I) were once gay, good-looking and hopeful’. 5 Would Leavis himself have wanted a memoir? He was popularly

that

associated with literary criticism of a purity that

authors’ lives.

own

He

interest in

did not object, in theory, to the idea of writing his

memoirs, though

temperament.

eschewed

in practice

In his eighties

he thought the task was not for

both Q.D.L. and

his publisher

his

urged Leavis

- and absolutely necessary’), but Leavis declared, ‘I shall never write more than there is in my Clark Lectures.’ 6 There were several reasons why Leavis would not embark on towards autobiography (‘A

best-seller

autobiography, apart from the obvious one that he was busy, to the end,

with plans for more criticism. play into the hands of those

who

‘persecution-mania’. Second, as

with the idea of writing

more important not

satisfy

intensely literary

now

a

things to do. 7 Third, he believed that his account could

- indignant about

to live

him of obsession, including he remarked to Greenham, he played accused

novel, but, as he told a former pupil, he had

Q.D.L. ’s ‘formidable

worlds

he thought autobiography would

First,

in general,

mainly on

my

the

sense’

of the

past. ‘She

way Cambridge, and

have treated

us;

with the

royalty income.’ 8

He

is

intensely

the academic and

result that

could not

daily

now: her

drug (her complex

illness

illness

has

left

her with

we have

risk the effect

of published recollections on her health. ‘There must be no that kind risked

- but

intensities

of

a heart that requires a

includes pericarditis).’

And

temperamental disinclination, which on one occasion

(to

there his

was

a

pupil,

PROLOGUE

8

Geoffrey Walton) he identified

him not

nature required

He

as ‘masculine’.

believed that his inner

to be diagnostically or descriptively explicit

about the betrayals he had experienced. 9 His history was hardly he revealed some of

it,

and

in talk

to

letters,

many

secret;

contacts over the

Ray-

years, a discourse that virtually constituted an ‘unwritten work.’,

mond As

Williams remarked. 10 to an account

of

by someone outside

his life

of

his family,

this

Leavis was distinctly dubious. Rather unwillingly he allowed a former pupil,

William Walsh, to write

Ronald Hayman published

a

a

book about him. When,

straightforward

treated this offering with disdain,

life

in

1976,

called Leavis the subject

though he partly objected

to

on an

it

Hayman’s work originally came out in the New Review whose funding by the Arts Council Leavis despised. By the end of his life Leavis encouraged no one to act as his biographer and instructed his literary executors to discourage proposals. They have continued to respect Leavis’s wishes. This book must not be construed issue

of literary

politics:

,

as

one authorized by the Leavis

The

book

present

biography

is

estate.

not an authorized biography, and perhaps hardly

at all in that

it

contains very

little

material of the ‘two-days-

and-a-failed-mackerel-fishing-trip-later’ kind. life’

for

two

reasons,

at

least.

handling challenges and circumstances for

Leavis

First,

as

But

it

was

seemed time for a

dynamic

coming pages Leavis

‘a

figure,

they presented themselves (and

Leavis a circumstance was often a reading of a work,

familiar). In the

a

new

or

will quite often be heard using

military language, like ‘liaison’, ‘field-performance’. His literary criticism

was

a series

of

life-activities, a praxis.

appreciated in a

first-class

Scrutiny (1979);

took the

‘militant’.

A

it

‘life’

also

study,

New

work was well Mulhern’s The Moment of

This aspect of his

Francis

Left to understand a political figure, a

was required because Leavis was

a teacher

with

charisma. This personal presence was not an incidental quality; he was

not simply

a

teaching was a

teacher with a remarkably interesting personality.

way of

academic person.

mimic

It

being

a

person

—

or not being another sort of

did not invite imitation. People did (and

the manner, but this

was

a sign

of

His

still

his inimitableness, rather

do)

than

you could not ‘do a Leavis’ in real life. Leavis’s demeanour as a teacher and in person became an emblem of seriousness, and that embarrassing to admit it — is what a pupil wants. The matter is well put the contrary;

by one of

Leavis’s

pupils

(195 1-4),

Michael Baxandall,

later

an art

THE PORTRAIT historian of great distinction.

than any other teacher

had;

I

had the same order of have to

considered

moved

moral,

call

how

sure he had a deeper effect

would

I

say that

two

for

want of

more focused

a

The

was not

effect

More

me

what

also

term.’

I

Baxandall

fields,

or

who

necessarily a desire to apply Scrutiny-

than that

matter perhaps of modification by demands of the

a

was

Leavis affected people in other academic

to them.

on

others, art historians,

intellectual effect, but Leavis’s

type methods elsewhere. it is

am

‘I

9

medium of the

objects

know set out partly to do Leavis on painting, so to speak, and that what emerged may not look like that. But am sure a whole set of values and priorities try to observe owe to Leavis - belief in a sense of one addresses. For myself

I

I

I

I

I

relevance, belief in valuation, admiration of complexity, belief in the detail

texture as index of the quality of total order, liking for culture in touch with the vernacular, a sense of the morality of technique, and so on. lots

of other

The

lists.

point

is,

though, that

a

There would be

thoroughly and consciously

Leavisian anthropologist, say, might be doing things that did not look superficially Leavisian.

became

Leavis

was

I

am a

not putting

this

some

conscience for

in his tutorial contacts.

very well

To

give

11 .

by means of the person he sense of Leavis means giving a

pupils, a

sense of him as a teacher.

There

another reason for attempting

is

‘a

life’.

Modern biography

favours detail, and detail appears to be an earnest of depth.

have depth, but

it

must have width, and width

is

A

‘life’

may

required, at this

juncture, for the understanding of Leavis. In the fifteen years since his

death ‘Leavis’ has

become

a

coagulation of attitudes and

times described well, sometimes barbancally. clear

is

What

is

beliefs,

some-

not yet generally

the sequence and scale, and the types, of his work. There

were

many Leavisian discoveries communicated to pupils that were little known to others: how often is the importance of Hamlet to Leavis noted?

How

often

is

his

Cottage’ recognized? ‘A

life’

of Wordsworth’s ‘The Ruined

requires

a

wide-angle

now, for this author. life was an unusual one conducted

appropriate, Also, the

seem

valuation

circumstances that

familiar, but call out to be specified. Wittgenstein

pupil,

Theodore Redpath, whether

life.

asked

‘I

him what he meant by “tragedy”. “Well,” he

mean the death of your old grandmother at said that mean suicides, madness or quarrels .”

enough not

once asked

I

to

a

there had been any tragedies in his

don’t I

in

something

lens,

have experienced any of these

replied, “I

the age of eighty-five, I

had been fortunate

terrible things.’

There were

PROLOGUE

10

quarrels in Lea vis’s

know

a

life, as

well as suffering, resolution and bitterness.

of the circumstances of

little

his

and

life

two world wars, leads out he made as a literary critic.

predicaments, through

known

discoveries

The

week attending

a

Downing. interesting

is

the lesser-

pupil of Leavis. i960,

1957 ani

fj

y

f’

Could reconcile him

re or

mind

dtaik by dnucnin*

to the u-jrhi of

lirounnr^.

HILAIR

E.M.W.

Tillyard as seen by The Granta in June 1928

THE ORIGINAL ‘CAMBRIDGE ENGLISH 1919-1926

67

’

him

for the lectures

on

literary criticism that

he gave after the Armistice.

Tillyard helped out with supervision at Jesus, where was in shock after the death of his son and preoccupied with literary work; he made

Q

himself indispensable.

soon became the

Cambridge little

house

New

factotum’

He was

at the centre

of the casual web of

an indefatigable supervisor, teaching

at his

Square, near where the Leavis family established

urban bridgehead

first

all-year-round resident of Cambridge, Tillyard

‘political

English. in

An

in

its

its

progress from the Fens.

was the administrator of Cambridge English from the beginning, and he was a member of the team of university Lecturers appointed Tillyard

1926

in

when

the faculty system began, but his progress to college

establishment was slow: he became a

fellow of Jesus in 1933, not so

full

very long before Leavis’s establishment Tillyard

s

career, unlike Leavis

s,

at

Downing. None

had the standard honours:

the

Firsts,

less,

prize

essay, research fellowship, full fellowship.

A more

glorious version of this route was taken by F.L. Lucas, an

exact contemporary of Leavis. Lucas was the son of a South London schoolmaster. He went up from Rugby to Trinity (Porson Prize for

Greek iambics) and had

a

to take a First in Part

One of

good war. 23

Medal and immediate fellowship of

A

brilliant linguist,

Lucas returned

the Classical Tripos, with Chancellor’s at

King’s College.

He remained

for the

occupying the place that would have been taken by Rupert Brooke had he survived, for Brooke in 1914 had wanted to join the English lecturing team. 24 Brooke was elected to a fellowship at rest

his life,

King’s in 1912 on the strength of his fellowship dissertation on the Jacobean dramatist John Webster, published as John Webster and the Elizabethan

Drama

work of

(1916), partly a

textual scholarship. Lucas

took over textual study of Webster, publishing

his

complete works

in

Lucas lectured variously, especially on tragedy; these lectures were published by the Hogarth Press. During the 1920s Lucas became its 1927.

Cambridge, helping between King’s and Bloomsbury. literary representative in

to

cement the connection

Lucas and Tillyard were immediate seniors to Leavis. There were two juniors who should be mentioned. Lucas was adopted by Bloomsbury, not with great enthusiasm: Virginia austere priest’.

known Press to

25

George Rylands,

as ‘Dadie’

in

a

key figure

Rylands, worked for

and was regarded with

Cambridge

Woolf called him

1919,

much more

a

at

a

‘bony rosy

King’s and always

short time for the

affection.

little

When

Hogarth

Leavis returned

Rylands was only seventeen years

old.

Like

—

ENGLISH AT CAMBRIDGE I919-I924

68

and Tillyard, he took one part of the English

Leavis, but unlike Lucas

Tripos, a year after Lcavis in 1922. (His other tripos was in in 1924.)

He belonged

tion. Tillyard

Rylands,

like

to the post-war generation,

classics,

taken

and the Eliot genera-

took time to get used to Eliot and Lucas mocked him, but

adored ‘Portrait of

Leavis,

and attempted

Lady’

a

a

homage to it in a poem that Eliot offered to publish in the Criterion but which came out as Russet and Taffeta from the Hogarth Press. The other junior, later prominent in Cambridge English, was Basil Willey. Son of a London businessman and Methodist, he was two years younger than Leavis and demobilized in 1919, having been wounded with the West Yorkshires. He took history in 1920. He was to remark that he was ‘one of those whose pattern of 1

8,

has had to be

same.

It

was

life,

When

again’. 26 Leavis could

unmade and remade

Basil Willey, not Leavis,

Edward VII Chair of English Leavis

changed

to

who

studies there

men were

succeeded

English

the

tweedy academic, studies

an

were

as

a

was

elfin,

appearance

in

Cambridge

in the

Q

dressed

with

and Lucas affected always to wear toast

of undergraduate

combination of sportiness and army-surplus,

blazer and cricket shirts, his

good-looking group

In

books

not averse to

in a city

streets did

people whistle

at

27

They male admiration. The in a rucksack.

widely travelled wife of an American Leavisian remarked years only

King

was Tillyard. But the bearers of

Rylands was ethereally handsome and the

Emmanuel

the

Chadwick were

were mostly eye-catching.

theatre. Leavis himself had a in

in

were Q, Forbes and For medieval and Anglo-

George Rylands and Stanley Bennett.

theatrical correctness, Forbes

blue.

Q

said the

seniors

the gangling Coulton and typically Yorkshire

modern English

have

was G.G. Coulton and H.M. Chadwick. The young

F.L. Lucas,

familiar style of

of 1 9 1 4

in 1946.

Richards, with Attwater an attendant lord.

Saxon

War

fixed long before the Great

later that

her husband.

Undergraduate and Postgraduate 1919— 1924 Leavis studied English without event until he took his finals in the spring

of 1921,

at

which point

examination papers

at

a

catastrophe occurred.

the end of

May, within seven

the ‘History of Literary Criticism’ earlier,

on

13

May, while he was

He had

to take six

days, ending with

on the Friday afternoon. 28

revising, his father

was

A week

fatally injured.

UNDERGRADUATE AND POSTGRADUATE I919-I924 Harry Leavis was riding out of Cambridge

Hauxton on

to

69

motor-

his

Another motorcyclist pulled out to overtake a lorry and collided with him. The machines were locked together, and Harry cycle, a Lea-Francis.

Leavis suffered severe head injuries, only recovering consciousness intermittently.

The other

rider survived, but could

During

accident.

following

the

days

men

He

was

Leavis

Addenbrookc’s Hospital, watching over

at

remember nothing of

his father as

bedside

his

at

the

he had attended

Denys Harding about it later. ‘He said he drew on his wartime experience ... of giving what care and attention was still possible for badly wounded men for whom no further medical treatment was useful or available.’ A week after the accident Harry Leavis went into a coma; two days later he died, on the day of his son’s first in France.

told

examination paper. The funeral took place during the afternoon of the

day Leavis took the ‘Tragedy’ paper. 29 At Old Chesterton Church,

many

attended by tives

was

including the Deputy

citizens,

Mayor and

it

was

representa-

of the Liberal Club and the League of Nations Union. Harry Leavis

fifty-nine years old.

The piano and music business was left in

the charge

of Ralph Leavis, the younger son. As for Leavis himself, he appeared the First Class in the tripos results that In late life Leavis

would

some family matters reticent

were published on

talk fairly freely

(the gifts

about the death of

of

21 June.

with relative strangers about

his elder son, for instance).

his father.

in

But he did jot an

He was

interesting note

copy of D.H. Lawrence’s Fantasia of the Unconscious probably in the late 1960s. He was clearly alerted to a passage in which Lawrence on

his

,

wrote about families and

them

how

are as intricate as those ‘between the

wireless stations’. Leavis underlined

It is

a ripple

time there

of

is

life

through the

all ties

individual being.

But

child isn’t

In the

at

bodies as through one body. But

bom

or claims. The highest goal of every man

it is

now

a

goal

you cannot reach by

his underlining, Leavis

the head of the family.

which he could consider becoming

result

but

a

all

the

the

is

the goal of pure

mere rupture of all

ties.

by being torn from the womb.

margin, against

Leavis was

many

one sentence:

the jolt, the rupture of individualism, the individual asserting

himself beyond

A

members of Marconi stations, two great

the connections between

poor one

in history.

a

wrote: ‘Yes!

13

May

1921.’

He was at the point of his career don. He had one excellent tripos

There was no likelihood of immediate

election to a junior fellowship, for

which there were few endowments

at

ENGLISH AT CAMBRIDGE I919-I924

70

Emmanuel anyway. He could have prepared a prize essay, but he needed an income. He therefore applied for a research studentship, taking a young modern academic, a non-Cantabridgean route. Q wrote a letter of recommendation for him to the Director of Studies at Emmanuel, to be forwarded to the Governing Body, a sign route rather like that of

that Leavis

was not

a

known

particularly well

Lea vis did quite well in the Tripos, especially

There was quality

consistently good. there, a trifle thin,

On

himself well.

one

the

in the earlier

too:

man had

that the

felt

them

in

in his college.

if

they were, here and

spent time in trying to express

he collapsed, but knowing the

(the Criticism) paper

last

and

papers which were

Mays

circumstances, and finding on inquiry that in the

his Criticism

paper had

him up for a First - even apart from the pluck of the whole performance, which was astonishing. (I lost my father in my last year at Oxford, and know what it means.) suppose Leavis was too shy to worry me personally for advice: and you know that under pretty constant bombardment by those who are not shy I haven’t the time to look up those who are. But I should be happy to make amends if given the chance of supervising his work for a research degree. He know enough of him to be pretty sure has suggested a very good subject, and

led the

whole

field,

hadn’t the faintest compunction in signing

I

I

I

he would

make

He was

a

good

fist

of it. 30

Mansfield Forbes had also acted

successful.

which Leavis wrote

a letter

of thanks.

pictured himself, and

how

may have been

I’m glad to be able to

been

you is

in vain:

the

I

you

tell

I’ve got the

for this result

he

that

It

throws seen

by

your exertions on

Emmanuel Research

more overwhelming

since

am, moreover, painfully aware

Leavis

others:

my

Studentship.

cannot adequately acknowledge.

how

on

light

My

behalf have not

What

I

owe

to

sense of obligation

had no claim on your attention, and

I

that in

our personal intercourse

always

I’ve

displayed a singularly unprepossessing gaucherie. But please believe that fully sensible

for

referee,

as

of your great kindness. The studentship means

all

the

more

I

to

am me

owing to circumstances at home, I should in any case have been unable to a job away from Cambridge. So you have done me a very great service

since,

take

indeed. 31

The

studentship was worth £150. Leavis was registered as a research

student under the supervision of Q. relations

earned

between journalism and

by submitting,

dissertation.

within

He began work on literature

three

years

for

the

a

study of the

Ph.D. that was

of registration,

a

long

UNDERGRADUATE AND POSTGRADUATE The

71

appeared on Leavis’s finished dissertation was ‘The

that

title

I919-I924

Relationship of Journalism to Literature: Studied in the Rise and Earlier

Development of the Press in England’. It focused on the eighteenth century. But the original scope was wider, and there were difficulties. Q later explained to I. A. Richards that ‘No small part of that job was steering him clear of nervous breakdown. Once think twice - I got the Board to abbreviate the scope of his thesis and consent to altering its title. I was extremely anxious about him, to the last moment.’ 32 Leavis began by doing a study of journalism that encompassed nineteenth- and I

twentieth-century history, understandably, given

This

poetry.

attested

is

by the

A

‘Journalism and Literature:

them

Q

in England’.

broader subject

Historical

dealt

with

fields closer to

from outside Cambridge,

mentioned. Alexandre Beljame’s Le Public Angleterre au dix-huitieme siecle

the death of

was published

Matthew Arnold, and not prime model for Leavis’s

This was

a

unrivalled

by any other study

The completed

in

new

registered:

Study of Relations between

petitioned a change in February 1924.

may have

scholarly influence

was originally

that

title

interest

his

a et

The

original

Q’s expertise. As for

French source should be les

hommes

in 1881,

de

lettres

en

seven years before

translated into English until 1949. literary sociology;

its

detail

was

in English. 33

dissertation surveyed journalism

from

the Elizabethan

period to that of the great reviews, the Edinburgh and the Quarterly of ,

the nineteenth century, with

of printed

matter in

the

more

era

Harmsworth becoming Lord

general handling of the proliferation

of the Harmsworth brothers (Alfred

Northcliffe)

who

acquired the Daily Mail,

the Daily Mirror and

The Times between 1896 and 1908, and whose fortune funded Q’s chair. Leavis had two themes that were to emerge later, in his

sociological.

own work With

the

and especially

growth of

in that

of

One theme was

his wife.

the print industries a

complex

variety

of specialized markets was created: groups of readers found their niches

and

it

became

increasingly difficult to

move, mentally, between the

work designed for different readership groups. The taste of a Mail reader would be locked on to a channel different from that

types of

Daily

of the Blackwood’s. Markets became exclusive: thus emerged high-, low-

and middle-brow niches. The second theme was directed themselves to

a

market they tailored

artistic.

their arts to

When it.

writers

So Robinson

Crusoe was vitiated by Defoe’s deference to the shop-keeper mentality.

He

directed his

artist’s

energy into enjoying the creation of down-to-

earth resourcefulness, not capturing the anguish of solitude.

(To which

ENGLISH AT CAMBRIDGE I919-I924

72

Ambulance Train

Lcavis was no stranger, on

designed to please, the attitudes or the less subtle.

of Leavis’s

The

When

the

writer

of consciousness expressed were

become the mark help of writings by I. A. Richards

evaluation of attitude was soon to

literary criticism,

were appearing

that

states

5.)

as

with the

he worked on

his dissertation.

Leavis was to be accused of nostalgia for a lost world of rural, ‘organic community’. In his Ph.D. dissertation the golden world brief urban one, that of the post-Restoration

and Roger L’Estrange, with the coffee-house cation in

To

which writing was

study for

a

a

London of John Dryden nerve-centre of communi-

for group, not market.

now

doctorate

a

is

seems an inevitable procedure for an

odd world of 1920s Cambridge. Leavis took an unusual path by registering for a newly invented degree. An account of why it was unusual will help to explain some of the

aspiring academic.

It

was not so

in the

of Leavis’s position.

stresses

Cambridge had offered a doctorate since 1883 in the form of a Litt.D., awarded after assessment of a body of published work. A doctorate by thesis had been suggested, but it was thought to be a cheap option, window-dressing that would devalue the Litt.D. This situation was not satisfactory for outsiders coming to Cambridge who could only take a

BA

by research

certificate attesting

who

(as

Emmanuel had

Stanley Bennett in

they had done high-level study. Foreign academics

needed Cambridge research and something more than

found the procedure demeaning. There was demand for recognized scientific research.

New

the great

would be greatest

‘a

Zealand

real

done), or a

The need was

scientist,

who

said that a

and very great departure

revolution in

my

felt

a a

second

BA

degree that

by Ernest Rutherford,

new

degree, the Ph.D.,

in English

education - the

opinion in modern times’. 34 There was

a

vigorous campaign for the establishment of the Ph.D., led by the Master

of Emmanuel, Peter

Giles.

The new degree was

1919, and students registered for

it

from

May

eventually approved in

1920.

So, as in changing from history to English, Leavis

unexpected or risky step have been needed by

in registering for the

scientists,

but

it

was not

route for higher studies in the humanities.

graduation was immediate election to

a

of tripos performance, something so

was

also taking an

Ph.D. The degree

may

necessarily a promising

The

ideal

prospect after

junior fellowship on the strength

much

part of the examination

system that the fellowship election of the best

First-class

men was

UNDERGRADUATE AND POSTGRADUATE I919-I924 by an

signified

asterisk in the result

This was the best possible to

move up by

But Leavis’s only

of F.L. Lucas).

and fellowship dissertation English was not starred, and

First in

Lytton Strachey

in

He was

in history.

who was

1902,

from which he

history,

(that

tried

research studentship, but

work

circumstances, as

decided on overtones.

It

a

One

he had

by writing

more

a

prize essay to

He

fortunate. a

received

could have gone elsewhere, but in he told Forbes, he wanted to stay with his mother.

was not

Ten

modern option with

a prestigious course: to

Why

had

have

a

a

longer piece of

He

Ph.D., the distinctively

of

mortified by his Second in

to recover

one had worked did not impress. writing

in Part

obliged him to take on

it

than a prize essay.

(the Tillyard route).

in a similar position to that

also

secure a research studentship. Leavis was

book form. The next best was

printed in

prizes

Lower Second

a

move

when

lists

73

his

He

scientific

doctorate for which

this ‘Dr’

gone

in for thesis-

was the only Ph.D. -holder teaching Cambridge English, though there were to be other doctors, like Richards at all?

and Tillyard,

was

slightly

not want

would

who owed

of publications. Leavis himself higher academic qualification. He did

their title to a set

embarrassed by

his

Ph.D.’ on the title-page of

New

Bearings in English Poetry

:

‘It

worst suspicions, and, anyway, looks comic.’ In later was made of Dr Leavis, sometimes as a Crippen-like,

raise the

much

years

years later Leavis

murdering-to-dissect’ analyst. (He was also, of course, married to another Dr Leavis.)

That the doctorate was no guarantee of academic success is shown by the fact that while Leavis was preparing his thesis three other men, younger than himself, were working through the English Tripos, took the ‘prize route’ and

were

to

move

into established posts before Leavis

himself. Like Leavis, each had taken one tripos in another subject, either classics

or

modern

languages.

L.J.

straight to a fellowship at Queens’.

Potts graduated in

1922 and went

T.R. Henn, son of an

land-agent, graduated in 1923, took a post with an

oil

Irish

Protestant

company

in India

and returned to teach freelance for the English Tripos while working on a prize essay. His Director of Studies was Tillyard, who taught him in the little house on New Square. And George Rylands, after graduating in

1924,

began work on

poetry for King’s.

The

trio

a

fellowship

dissertation

was

assessed

by

a

structure

of

overtook Leavis.

Despite Q’s concern, Leavis completed his thesis

on the

work on

time.

report from and interview with the

supervisor and an examiner from another institution.

On

A

doctoral

Cambridge

this

occasion

ENGLISH AT CAMBRIDGE I919-I924

74

was George Saintsbury, the

the external examiner

and prosody,

as

well as critic and translator of French literature.

other qualifications for assessing

his

Among

on journalism, he had been

a thesis

of the Saturday Review from 1883 to 1894. In

assistant editor this

historian of criticism

his seventies

old bon vivant was writing his Notes on a Cellar-Book. Leavis wrote

ruefully that ‘He (and

I) still

35 belonged to pre-1914 England.’ Saintsbury

did not dispute the value of the work, and the degree was approved on 18

66

November for the new

week

1924, to be conferred a

later. It

became

thesis

No.

degree.

Matters of Feeling: Forbes and Richards Leavis had graduated as just

before Christmas

BA 1924.

was conferred

three years before his Ph.D.

This did not

mean he

ceased going to

university lectures that interested him, and in 1925 there was one course

of undergraduate lectures to which Leavis gave intense attention.

LA. Richards’s

This

series ‘Practical Criticism’.

series

was

as

It

much about

the analysis of responses to poetry as about analysis of poetry

Richards handed out printed sheets of poems (four poems inviting his audiences ‘to

comment

freely in writing

was

itself.

at a time),

upon them’. He

then took back the statements, which he called ‘protocols’, analysed

them and

lectured

on the

results.

He wanted

to

know how

people read

poetry, but he had a larger project in mind. Poetry, he argued, belonged to the ‘vast corpus

of problems’ that are addressed by subjective opinion,

rather than scientific

world, in feeling .’

for

brief,

method or conventional

who

it

was

‘an

matters of

eminently suitable

bait

wishes to trap current opinions and responses’. His

survey of the protocols was therefore ideology’.

thumb: ‘The whole

of abstract opinion and disputation about

Poetry invited subjectivity, so

anyone

rule of

Leavis attended,

‘a

piece of fieldwork in comparative

and went on attending, even when the

course was repeated ‘four or five years in a row, to the same ones’; to

Richards,

it

was ‘uncanny’. 36 Not

extraordinary innovation in

so

uncanny: the course was an

at least three

ways. Richards offered

concepts for the analysis of poetry; he looked for the

first

new

time,

it

what people, not authors or men of letters, really thought about what they read - and at the views of students. And his method, the use of the mass survey, was ground-breaking. (The use of the

seemed,

at

questionnaire

became standard Leavisian

practice, notabiy in Q.D.L.’s

MATTERS OF FEELING: FORBES AND RICHARDS preparation for her Fiction and the Reading Public.)

75

The performance

style

of the lectures was original as well, signifying a new means of interaction between audience and Lecturer, with implications for the relations between teacher and student. No wonder Leavis wanted to attend. Mansfield Forbes was also often present. Both he and Leavis duly gave in their

(anonymous) protocols

when Richards wrote up

publication

A

made him

s

data-store illustrate the vivacity

(Leavis thought) the soul of the

Leavis were intrigued

by Group

new

subject. Forbes

in Richards’s sets

II

for eventual

the experiment in Practical Criticism:

Study of Literary Judgement (1929). The Forbes contributions to Richards

that

by Richards, and

for analysis

of poems,

and

a set

of

by Edna St Vincent Millay, Gerard Manley Hopkins, D.H. Lawrence - and J.D.C. Pellew, whose poem Richards meant to 37 four

be the dud.

Leavis very often used, and read plangently, the Millay

poem

in his

own

Vhat Forbes had to say about it in 1924 illustrates a concept that became basic to Leavis’s criticism, the concept of a ‘complex’, even though he did not use that word. later lectures.

5

What’s

this of death,

Think you the wrist

The thumb your

In

full

from you who that fashioned

that set the

will

you

never die?

in clay,

hollow just that way

throat and lidded the long eye

So roundly from the forehead, will let lie Broken, forgotten, under foot some day

Your unimpeachable body, and so slay The work he most had been remembered by? I

tell

you

whatever of dust to dust

this:

Goes down, whatever of ashes may return

To

essential self in

its

its

own

season,

Loveliness such as yours will not be

upon

But, cast in bronze

Make known him Forbes compared Millay in the

same group:

This

a studied

is

from

a

orgasm from

very urn,

master, and for

Hollow at thermos vacuum, sonnet.

first

‘the

The

what good

reason.

sonnet to the good Pellew’s sentimental

a

‘Shakespeare-R. Brooke’ complex,

‘Marvell-Wordsworth-Drink water,

italics]

Seater

s

his

lost,

reading,

etc., stark-simplicity’

resoundingly hollow

very thing’ for

at

as [Pellew’s]

complex, [my

second.

A

a dignified picnic in this sort

Heroic-Hectoring’

of

line

1,

the

hearty

poem

sort

of

of

Two-

quasi-stoical

ENGLISH AT CAMBRIDGE I919-I924

76

button-holing of the unimpeachably equipped beloved, the magisterial hnger-

wagging of on

as

tell

‘I

you

this’!!

Via such conduits magnanimity

an indispensable, if not obligatory,

Forbes gave the

modern convenience

name ‘complex’

two

to

may soon

be

laid

38 .

amalgams, one

stylistic

a

mixture of elements from ‘Shakespeare— R. Brooke’ and the other from

‘Marvell-Wordsworth-Dnnkwater’. This method of defining style, showing how it ‘carried’ and disseminated down through writer- and was

readerships,

in Forbes’s

mission to the literary Influential

writers,

said

something other than

hands vivid and subtle.

critic,

also delivered a

It

or potential critic in the case of Leavis.

Foucault

much

create

later,

‘a

tor

possibility

something belonging to what

their discourse, yet

number of divergences — with respect to his own texts, concepts, and hypotheses — that all arise from the psychoanalytical discourse itself. The Marxian or Freudian becomes a complex of meaning. The mission of the commentator may they founded’. So Freud ‘made possible

a certain

be to separate off the complex from the original. mission of Leavis as literary

critic

to

try

to

It

was

certainly the

ensure that a writer’s

by derivative mixtures, complexes that occur beyond his or her responsibility. This critic’s endeavour was to protect Wordsworth from the Wordsworthian, to beware the stylistic originating style was not eclipsed

packages that form

when

an adhesiveness in one style cannot

appealing surface shape in another. Leavis was authenticity.

He

much concerned with

from the Shakespeare-ish (something

commentaries on

Forbes’s in Practical Criticism.

He wrote on seems to

me

the

Group

II

poems appear alongside

(Of poor Pellew, he only wrote

that these four

poems have been chosen because they

touched-off and full-volumed responses, and so are

tality

and kindred

vices. [Thisj offers

cheap reassurance

matter of deep and intimate concern.

It

hearty alliteration. all

It

the best people.

season’)

what

a

cocksure

is

to

most men

movement and

contains (along with the appropriate ‘dust to dust’) echoes It is

full

of vacuous resonances

(‘its

essential self

and the unctuously poetic.

He most

play for

danger of sentimen-

in

in

all

opens with Browning’s brisk no-

nonsense-about-me directness and goes on with

of

‘Uplift’.)

Millay’s sonnet.

easily

a

slightly

from the Shakespearean).

Leavis’s

It

an

liked to set examination questions challenging candidates

to distinguish Shakespeare

different

resist

favoured Gerard Manley Hopkins’s ‘Margaret’:

is its

own

MATTERS OF FEELING: FORBES AND RICHARDS like this best

I

world of puzzled

at

of

all.

What

wanwood

know why’

lealmeal

lie

reading because

first

— ‘Golden grove

looks like preciosity

I

—

is

really a

took

‘will

77 unleafing’ and

means of compression.

in ‘and yet

you

will

I

was

weep and

be future. Wistfulness without sentimentality: the pang of transience well conveyed.

Of D.H. I

to

Lawrence’s ‘Piano’ he wrote that

have not been able to find

to trust

to

my judgement.

have escaped

not,

I

all

It

a

moment

for this

when

I

have not been too

tired

runs an appalling risk of sentimentality and yet seems

offensiveness; a considerable achievement.

think, of very great value.

The

accent

(This curious, intimate note of fatigue

is

familiar.

It is

D.H.L .?

poignant, but

39

was voiced by Leavis throughout

his life.)

The sound of poetry was important to Forbes. In his lectures on Romanticism there were enthusiastic readings-out of poetry. Forbes’s rendering of Wordsworth’s sonnet ‘Surprised by Joy — Impatient

Wind’ The

issued in a

diagram of its

architectonics of the

groups with suggestions of

a

vital

poem

tomb and pang

structure:

consist

unity of rhythm.

movement makes up there

is

of three sentences forming rhythmic

The motor imagery with

for the lack

its

minor

of visual imagery. In words

like

something different from normal onomatopoeia —

sound echo of the emotional sense

This sonnet became

as the

a

40 .

of exposition for Leavis. Forbes’s point about rhythm compensating for imagery, or sound echoing ‘emoa classic object

was valuable

him when he wanted to contest the common idea, partly promoted by the Imagist movement, that poetry is primarily visual. Richards also read out poetry. He would ‘take breath and read it with the ears’, not always having quite enough breath for Shelley or Hopkins. (Leavis said he could himself swim a hundred yards under water, but not manage a Swinburne stanza.) On one occasion tional

sense’,

for

Forbes collaborated with Richards

in

an aural experiment: both gave

renderings to the lecture audience, but each stepped outside so as not to be influenced by the reading of the other. Richards especially admired

C.K. Ogden’s virtuoso reading of Hopkins’s ‘The Wreck of the Deutschland Some of Richards’s lecture material appears in an essay he wrote on Hopkins in the American journal the Dial. He demonstrated that .

rhythm was tied in with verbal intricacy, the thing that Cambridge criticism was popularly supposed to be about. Richards subtlety of

ENGLISH AT CAMBRIDGE I919-I924

78

showed

that difficult

rhythms slowed down or paced

attention, enabling

the reader to catch hold of ambiguity, while blander

modes of

verse

hurried on. Hopkins’s rhythms were a preparation for his semantic

when he (1932). He

complexities. Leavis took up these ideas in his lectures, and

came

to write

on Hopkins

in

New

Bearings in English Poetry

favoured too Richards’s patrician scorn for the clumsiness and pretension 41 of the prosodists’ worries about the metrics of Hopkins. For Leavis, it

was sound

that

was

at

the heart of Cambridge.

surge and thunder of the Odyssey subtleties

’

my

What

friend,

life is,

longer was

that mattered but a

of living speech’, some of it ‘Ah,

No

new

in T.S. Eliot:

you do not know, you do not know

you who hold

(Slowly twisting the

it

in

lilac stalks)

your hands’; .’ .

.

42

it

‘the

pulse, ‘the

1

CHAPTER THREE

Exciting Strangeness 192 5-193

It

is

an event to have the response of

problems envisaged by is

as alive as

human

Mr

Eliot and

younger generation

a

Mr

Richards, for

to the

Mr Empson

they to the exciting strangeness of the present phase of

history.

F.R. Leavis, Intelligence and Sensibility’, Cambridge Review, 1931

Freelance

1925-1926

Leavis got on well with Stanley Bennett at Emmanuel College and with the young woman he married. Joan Frankau was from a well-off Jewish family, and went up to Girton College from

Wycombe Abbey

School

do two years of French and Spanish for the Medieval and Modern Languages Tripos. She then changed to the new English Tripos, taking a to

First in its

very

first

set

of examinations

During her year of English she met Stanley Bennett; they fell in love and married in 1920. The Bennetts were part of the small group making up Cambridge English that lasted

down

in

1919.

to the early 1960s. Leavis

was

regular visitor

a

to the Bennetts

through the 1920s, and would go on holiday with them to France, usually near Clermont-Ferrand. The friendship lasted until a couple of years after Leavis’s own marriage.

There were many female students of the humanities in Cambridge, young women in tussore silk blouses and Liberty ties (and some still in gym-slips),

much

more English

bicycling back and forth from

Newnham, which had

students, and Girton. Stanley Bennett

was

a

supervisor at

both and Leavis followed him into freelance supervising at the beginning of 1925, his doctorate now behind him. There was plenty of supervising to be done. At Girton the Director of Studies in languages was Hilda Murray, who inherited English students when the new tripos was

J

EXCITING STRANGENESS I9^5 — 93 1

8o

James Murray, editor of the great Oxford English Dictionary, much of her youth was spent in writing out wordquotation slips (at sixpence a thousand), which developed her formidable formed. Daughter of

memory and

Sir

severe enthusiasm for medieval studies.

a

unsuited to her

made demands

English Tripos

engaged Leavis

as

Aware

that the

Oxford education,

she

supervisor and took a liking to him. At that date there

was prospect of later employment, even though college fellowships were few and far between. Three years earlier the Royal Commission had reported on the organization (or disorganization) ot the university, and the

government proposed making an annual grant of £90,000 to the university itself, the federation of colleges, as opposed to any one college, so long as its central organization was rationalized. By this means the university itself

would have

autonomy;

greater administrative

would

it

by the government funds. Previously the subject of English had, besides the two professors, only one university-salaried Lecturer. More lectureships could be anticipated and

have

faculties

and lectureships,

fortified

Leavis seemingly had the right qualifications, even though there was a handful of young people already in on the act. He was now also able to offer a lecture course.

In January 1925 Leavis joined the pool of college Lecturers.

He gave

a

course on ‘Literature and Society from the Restoration to the Death of

Johnson’,

a

natural choice given the subject of his Ph.D. thesis.

The

was ill-provided with eighteenth-century courses: there were only fairly mundane surveys available, from S.C. Roberts (later the Sherlock Holmes aficionado) and Attenborough from Emmanuel, soon

lecture-list

to leave

for

a

career in university administration.

meant there would be

a

vacancy for

Leavis was clearly thought well

Director of Studies

a

of.

But

Bennett was senior

experience, but both he and Leavis were interviewed classics to

‘shared

£5

a

his at

Emmanuel.

in

by

departure

a

years and

fellow in

determine whether the ‘private tuition’ (supervision) should be

between them’. Bennett was appointed

term, with ‘Dr Leavis asked to

beginning of allocated the

his first

room

academic year

for teaching

on

assist’.

1

as

In

Director of Studies,

October 1925,

as university

‘K’ staircase that

at

at the

teacher, Leavis

was

had been shared by

Attenborough and Bennett, and which he shared with two college fellows. For the start of this year there was a change in the name of Leavis’s lecture course. The ‘society’ element was removed and the period abbreviated, eliminating the period from 1660 to 1700.

now

lecturing simply

on ‘Eighteenth-century

Literature’.

He was

FREELANCE I925— 1926

8l

The two

years following Lea vis’s graduation (1925-6) saw an unexpected festival of literary criticism in Cambridge English; they were the months of Murry, Eliot and Richards. In February John Middleton

Murry

1925

began

his series in

the Trinity College foundation of Clark Lectures,

Keats and Shakespeare

The lectures were both prestigious and remuthe fee of £200 rivalled a Lecturer’s annual salary. Murry in June to speak about criticism and modern poetry to a college

nerative.

returned society.

.

He nominated

agreed. Eliot gave the

T.S. Eliot as his successor, to which Trinity

first

of

his series,

‘The Metaphysical Poetry of the

Seventeenth Century’, on 26 January 1926. The lectures were so little Olympian that Eliot ended his first by asking the audience to buy a set book: H.J.C. Grierson s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems the Seventeenth of

Century from Donne

to

Metaphysical Poets’,

as a

Butler (1921). Eliot

had written an essay, ‘The review of the anthology that appeared too late

volume of literary criticism, The Sacred Wood. The Clark Lectures gave to a Cambridge audience of opinion-formers, with the for his

new

first

tripos in their charge, the

most expansive version

concept of metaphysical poetry, the

same year

his

own

immediately reviewed review

as

a

Selected in the

it

concept, also, of his

to date

own

of

Eliot’s

poetry.* In

Poems: 1909-1925 appeared. Richards

New

Statesman and Nation, reprinting this

an appendix to the second edition of his The Principles of

Literary Criticism (1926).

LA. Richards was not

Cambridge senior; he was younger than Stanley Bennett and only two years older than Leavis. But it was Mansfield Forbes who was the most youthful in spirit of the new Cambridge English. His lecturing style was playful, peppered with neologisms

(

savoirfairishness

(memorably, Blake tion

a

by wiggling

his

s

vitamimneous’).

,

a

chanted

poems

Hear the Voice of the Bard ) and signalled quotafingers round his ears to represent inverted commas.

Forbes managed to enchant his pupils.

wrote

He

poem about him many

One of

them, Margaret Higgle,

years later.

Mansfield Forbes (1889—1936)

The phrase indcscent The pun whose absurd * ‘Eliot had begun

a

theory based on three metaphysical

the thirteenth century;

Donne

in

London

the nineteenth century. Implicitly, there in the

twentieth century’, Clark pp. 3-4. ,

in the

was

a

moments - Dante

Florence

in

seventeenth century; Laforgue in Pans

in

fourth

moment

at

hand -

in

Eliot in

London

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

82

Inconsequence crescent

With meaning astounded; The quip effervescent The fabulous word Hydraheaded

An

rounded

that

acre of meaning;

Bright sabres of wit

For the law obsolescent

The

belief

overweening -

Bright words

now

quiescent

Yet the sparks that they

The

kindling they

Glow

Forbes’s idiosyncrasy

was

lit

on, incandescent

Denys Harding described him more

stirred

2 .

soberly:

allowed him to offer you

his trustful generosity that

share in his thinking and explorations before he had finished with

personal adventure and converted

he and

his hearers

instance,

might

them

a

as a

them

into cautiously qualified statements that

with.

He

feel safe

took us with him into

a

poem,

for

while he worked out the most effective rhythms and phrasings,

changes of tempo, pitch of voice -

of what the

poem was

doing.

all

Of

course

sometimes exaggerated and of course the ‘young’ people in front of

stemming from and adding

him

it

it

took

a

to one’s grasp

long time and of course he

wasn’t pabulum for hungry examinees;

revealed their prudent middle-age-to-be by

smiling and staying away. His interventions in Richards’s practical criticism course had similar characteristics, their value depending, of course, not just on their spontaneity

and vividness but on the fineness ot insight and judgement

they conveyed. I.

A. Richards, unlike Forbes, was

about the same time

of work was finished

at

Principles of Literary

Criticism

completed

Ph.D.

his

a theorist.

thesis.

was published

His

first

considerable piece

as Leavis’s.

in

Richards’s The

1924, the year Lea vis

Previously he had published a series of

on psychology and aesthetics, most of which were gathered into collaboration with C.K. Ogden, The Meaning of Meaning: A Study of

articles

his the

Influence of

Language upon Thought and of

the

Science of Symbolism

new conception of symbolism. For him, ‘symbolism’ was closer to what many would think to be ordinary language, language committed by its user to make a true (1923).

The

title is significant:

Richards had devised

a

record of matter to be transported into statement: that language. In

a

is,

referential

paper ‘On Talking’ (1921, Chapter Ten of The Meaning of

FREELANCE 1925— 926 I

83

Meaning) he d.st.nguished referenda language from ‘evocative’ or ‘emotive language in which the essential concern of the user is the arousal of an attitude, by means of ‘new, sudden and striking collocations

of

references for the sake of the

compound

effects

of contrast,

conflict,

harmony, interinanimation and equilibrium’. He could have been describing the verse of Eliot, a new friend. Or that of John Donne, considering his use of the word ‘interinanimation’. In the

appendix to the Principles review of Selected Poems: 1909-1925) Richards focused on Eliot’s use of emotive language whose logic, in The Waste Land published a few months earlier, was not that of a ‘coherent intellectual thread’. ‘The (the

items are united by the accord, contrast, and interaction of their tional effects, not by an intellectual scheme that analysis

By

these emotive

wavering yet

still

emo-

must work out

’

means ‘attitude’ is created, the subtleties or velleities forming some sort of whole. It was in such ‘wholes’

that lay the value

of emotive or evocative (in short, poetic; but not only metrical) language-use. These wholes were not easily to be understood; the reader must be apt for their apprehension. Moving from his definition of a type of language-use to its value, Richards arrived at a requirement of high competence in the reader (later, anglice, elitism): ‘The value lies in the unified response which this interaction creates in the right 3

The

reader.’

relation of the ‘right reader’ to other readers

(wrong readers and

non-readers) was considered in the body of Principles in which Richards stated why the ‘rightness’ of readers mattered:

To

bridge the gulf, to bring the level of popular appreciation nearer to the consensus of best qualified opinion, and to defend this opinion against damaging attacks (Tolstoy’s

is

been produced, of

a typical

why

this

example),

opinion

dangerous, because they appeal to

These two

is

a

much

right,

is

a natural instinct,

clearer account than has yet essential.

These attacks are

hatred of ‘superior’ persons.*

emotive logic of poetry and the desiderated ‘right reader were basic for Leavis. In the same year as he enunciated these factors, Richards also had published his essay ‘Gerard Hopkins’ in the Dial, which elaborated the priority he gave to the sound of poetry in his factors, the

,

lectures. 4

In 1926

for Leavis.

was the

*

On

Richards published Richards had

a

book. Science and Poetry, also basic genius for the haunting phrase; in this book it a short

neutralization of nature. His thesis

‘superior persons’, sec this chapter, ‘Precarious

was

that the secular

Terms 1928-1929

world of

EXCITING STRANGENESS

84

I9 2 5~ I 93

I

had experienced the ‘neutralization ol nature the magical. The dissolution of the ‘Magical View’ of nature or of nature as spirits, neither natural world was no longer animated by spirit or His practical possessing supernatural energies, nor possessed by them. accomview of nature may have been affected by his experience as an

the twentieth century

,

Forbes not offered him teaching for the mountain-guide. English Tripos, he would have become a professional

Had

mountaineer.

plished

Human groups.

‘Is

this the

had mattered so and Poetry

.

explanation

why

wrote Leavis

little?’

therefore

It

women working

were defined by men and

values

fell

in

social

the upsetting of the Magical

View

margin of his copy of Science group, untaught from without,

in the

to the social

valued and recognize distinctions in value not only between ideas but also between attitudes and emotional states. Richards He had thus sharply restated his evaluative sense of consciousness. to create

what

it

in Eliot already proposed one sort of consciousness to be emulated, mind poetry he found and had proposed ‘a model of the meditative

Science and Poetry legitimized Leavis it

reminded him of

a

desire to evaluate attitudes.

s

poem by Thomas Hardy

to

s

.

And

which he often

‘neutralizareturned. Richards said that ‘After a Journey’ epitomized the of nature’. In the bleak arena of a Cornish sea-haven the slap of

tion

waves

is

no kind of supernatural speech. Hereto

I

come

Whither,

Up

the

cliff,

O

to

view

a voiceless

whither will

down,

till

its

ghost;

whim now draw me?

I’m lonely,

lost

And the unseen waters' ejaculations awe me. Where you will next be there s no knowing. Facing round about me everywhere .

With your nut-coloured

And ‘You’

is

.

.

hair,

gray eyes, and rose-flush coming and going.

not here Pan but Hardy’s dead, latterly unloved wife.

Cambridge English began in October I9 2 5- In this month three people went up to Cambridge who later were at the core of Leavis’s group. Two were to be editors of Scrutiny. Denys Harding went up to Emmanuel and became Leavis’s

As

in

first

his

full

academic year

dissertation

on journalism:

as

a

see

‘Undergraduate and Postgraduate 1919-1924’.

teacher for

Chapter Two,

English

at

Cambridge,

FREELANCE I925— 1926

85

Lea vis’s pupil. Lionel Knights only met Lea vis later as he began postgraduate work, after he had read History at Selwyn. At Girton arrived Queeme Dorothy Roth, who was to be Leavis’s most remarkable pupil.

And

October 1925 William Empson, whose poetry and criticism was to exhilarate Leavis, went up to Magdalene. Queeme Dorothy Roth was the eldest daughter in a North London Jewish family of No. 79, Silver Street, Edmonton; she was born on 7 December 1906. Her father was successively hosier and draper, living over

also in

his shop,

some time during Q.D.R.'s time at Cambridge, when they moved up the street to No. 24. Had they not done so her until

mother, Jenny Roth, and her

sister

death from a parachuted land-mine

Ruby in

Caroline would have escaped

December

1940.

Jenny Roth, born 8 September 1876, married Morris Roth when he was twenty-seven years old in July 1903. She was the daughter of Polish immigrants Emelia Motrez and David Krotoszynski (or Davis), a hairdresser of Holywell Street, Shoreditch. Evidently she could not write her name, and only gave a mark in the register

The

rather than a signature.

father of Morris

Roth, Aaron, was a ‘general dealer’, an emigrant to Glasgow, then Sunderland and finally London.

from Konigsberg first He had two sons: Morris’s brother Abraham left England for diamondmining m South Africa. When he returned to England he suffered from mental instability and died in care; the family believed there was a strain

of melancholia

Q.D.R.

s

in

it.

background was

that

of

poor but cultured family hampered by three clever children, two girls and a boy, wanting books, music and college education’. 5 The parents were ‘tall, thin, sallow,' refined-looking people’. The family was orthodox and the children had a

private teacher for

language by ear Leonard.

when

He had

‘a

whom Q.D.R.

Hebrew, from

picked up the

she gave lessons to her brother, the eldest child

an assisted place,

as

did the other children, at nearby

co-educational Latymer School, in Hazelbury Lane. Leonard went on to Clare College, Cambridge, spending some time at

Dulwich College

before going up. in

Part

Two

He

studied Mathematics and

(1924-6).

Caroline became

a

The two

girls

also

was

went

a

Wrangler, or to

Latymer.

First,

Ruby

schoolteacher in the neighbourhood. 6

At Girton, Q.D.R. was

in the

minority of

girls

who

had attended

a

co-educational school. She did well at sports (‘excellent shooting’ at

and showed from the beginning a ordinary readability. She wrote poems and netball)

gift for stories,

writing with extra-

some

for the school

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

86

One

magazine.

with the red

from

a

of them described vividly

and long hair of

tie

movable wooden

writer in her teens. There

London

the

Public

Q.D.L.

an oriental

England

‘oxygenated’,

is

A

personality.

single

city.

Years

crowd

that he

it is

is

of

in the depiction

word

a

later in Fiction

that

suits

and

her

own

prose,

a feast ot

page of her writing yields

Reading

the

prose of Elizabethan

‘risk-taking’

the ‘racy’,

that

said

a tiny

crowds capable of materializing out of nowhere

street, little

as swiftly as in

interesting about

is

romantic element

a

is

haranguing

the irony that might be expected ot a

awe nor

seen neither with the

a socialist,

What

stand.

left-wing street speaker,

a

and her

information,

From one angle she was the writer of the two Lea vises, lucid as Orwell or Mary McCarthy. Her mind is perhaps ‘prosaic’: there is nothing - remembering Richards on Eliot

discrimination (and recrimination).

‘meditative’ about is

but in

blunt,

it,

is

a

is

shown

about F.R.L.

is

pertinent

the

enthusiasms there sloppiness

as there

rumination. Q.D.L.

with which she projects her

clarity

crackling idealism.

in Fiction and the

in full

Her enchanted

Reading Public

when

disgust

at

she says that in

good old days before suburbanism and the Baby Austin motorcar, ‘No nice girl danced more than twice in one evening with the same man.’ Q.D.R. went up to Girton on a good scholarship. Fellow undergraduates thought she was boastful when she told others in the new intake that her parents ‘had waived the emoluments but students must surely the

,

be excused some gaucheness in their freshman weeks. She had

the

first

months

at

a

household to her college

went up with

reputa-

determined scholar, and she evidently, at least in Girton, brought some of the ways of an orthodox

was

tion for austerity,

a

life.

Sophie Baron, another Jewish

who

girl

her, said that

one extremely cold winter heard her coughing

all

I

night.

went I

into her

room

early in the

morning, having

— her room was vehemently - she refused

offered to light her fire for her

- and make her a hot drink. She refused vehemently - to do work of any kind on the Sabbath was forbidden ... I reminded her that the Book of Rules expressly allows all rules to be broken in

icy

cases

of

illness if necessary: she

and cough, even until sunset

when

a severe

one

knew that, illness. And she

snorted and said that she like this,

was

the Sabbath ends; luckily

it

not an

but

cold

a

lay in

was around 4 p.m., without

bed

a tire

or hot food and drink.

Queenie’s brother Leonard arranged with the Girton authorities tor her to

be out

late

on Fridays. After the

services

at

the

synagogue

in

FREELANCE I925— 1926

87

Thompson s Lane, there was usually a guest speaker to room above Thurston’s Cafe in St Andrew’s Street. Both

be heard in

a

she and Sophie

Baron were members of the Jewish Students’ Society and went to a number of its functions. She had weekly parcels from home of kosher food, appreciated because (she later told her daughter) Girton fare was acceptable only to those who had been to boarding-school; it was inedible for the girls who were used to home cooking.

not known long she kept up the ways of her religious background. Not long, it seems; and she must have been fully aware of the drastic break that would ensue when she ‘married out’. Later there was hardly any consciousness of Jewish heritage in the Leavis family. Their daughter It is

how

Kate, for example, reminisced that

my

year at

first

Oxford, when

‘I

I

had no idea

was half Jewish until was informed accordingly by a I

contemporary.’

Q.D.L. was noted as a book worm, sighted on occasion as a simultaneous walker and reader on the dull half-hour trudge back to Girton from town known as the ‘Girton Grind’. She was a member of In college

the exclusive Girton ‘secret society’ called

After Another

ODTAA

Damn Thing version of A Room

(‘One

which Virgina Woolf delivered a of One's Own, after which she promised to send Queeme Roth some pamphlets. She was particularly keen on the novels of Henry James, and ),

to

journals, taking The Times Literary Supplement, the New Statesman, the Spectator and the more ‘feminine’ Time and Tide. For

her English Tripos

she chose ‘Early Literature and History’, under the care of wick, and was delighted by it and him:

The

first

thing one noticed about

H.M. Chad-

him was how unacademic he was,

the refreshing absence of that aura of anecdotes, social values and lack of real interest which is so discouraging to the young. His kindly eyes looked at

once

innocent and shrewd, he retained his Yorkshire accent, and always wore Norfolk jacket and bicycling breeches costume.

a

was her introduction to the sociology of literature, but that of the ancient world of northern Europe. His capacity for giving a ‘unified It

study’ of all kinds of cultural artefacts enthralled her.*

* i

the

m po r tance

period

in

of Chadwick

which

Cambridge 1939-1947’.

interest

is

in

set aside

him

here for later consideration

revived.

Sec Chapter Seven,

when

describing

Wartime, ‘Old

EXCITING STRANGENESS

88

now

Lcavis was

Hall Crescent.

living at

By

Harry Leavis was

home

with

I9 2 5 _I 93

I

widowed mother

his

at

Chesterton

second academic year (1926/7) the tamily of decline, but Leavis himself was gaining authority.

his

in

The music business showroom next to

Ralph Leavis. In 1926 the the University Arms Hotel was taken over by a did not prosper under

neighbouring dress shop, the Leavis shop confining itself to the former warehouse premises across the road on Downing land. Leavis & Son was now a music dealer’, not a pianoforte business, perhaps because of the expense of maintaining a stock of large instruments.

himself prospered. the

modern

He

period.

lectures each

It

planned to overhaul

going over into

would give a series of ‘Modern Novels and Modern

that he

was announced

term on ‘Modern Poetry’,

in Criticism’, a striking

Problems

his lectures,

But Leavis

innovation and entry into the

field

of

LA. Richards, the most popular Lecturer. But at the last minute he changed his mind. He gave only the ‘Modern Poetry’ course and in the second and third terms Leavis continued to lecture on the eighteenth century.

curious adventure delayed Leavis’s presentation of himself as a moderncentury Leavis referred to ist. During his lectures on the eighteenth

A

James Joyce’s Ulysses (1922). He probably compared the homogeneous reading-public of the eighteenth century to the highbrow versus low7 brow divisions of the twentieth century. Ulysses had been banned in

copy was seized at Croydon 1923 Chief Constables were warned by the Home Office to look out for illicit copies. The novel was well known to the intelligentsia. The Cambridge Mercury hailed Ulysses (with David

December Aerodrome. From April Britain

since

1922,

when

a

Garnett’s Lady into Fox) as indispensable, and The Granta reviewed it in 8 the novel was 1922, but possession of it was illegal. The suppression of the indirect cause of Leavis’s change of

mind about making

a

debut

as a

modernist. In the

summer of

1926 Leavis got into conversation with his bookseller

about the censorship exercised by the American customs authorities. Galloway & Porter was a long-established book business with an intellectual bent. Leavis

‘Well,

we

letter for

asking at

if

remarked

that the situation

can’t talk: there are

books you

was the same

in

England:

can’t get me.’ Leavis dictated a

Charles P. Porter to send to the Chief Constable of Cambridge, a copy of Ulysses could be supplied. A police officer then called

the shop, advising Porter that he needed

Home

Office permission that

FREELANCE 1925— 1926

89

could be petitioned through the Chief Constable’s office. Porter wrote oft a letter (17 July) containing a statement to be sent to the Home

Dr

Office, saying that ‘

which he requires

for purposes

Modern Problems current lecture

list

Leavis requested a permit to obtain one copy

of illustration and comment

in Criticism”.

This course

is

now

in his course

included in the

tor the English Tripos.’

(He must have meant his fiction course, because this one was not yet announced, unless he was writing loosely.) But the bookshop owner went further and also asked if a copy could be supplied, to be placed in a suitable library ‘for use of students attending this course only’ and asking, alternatively, whether a

Home

Ottice representative ‘would be in

supply to any student

a

copy

a

position to permit us to

for study’.

This Ulysses story was told by Leavis himself in 1963, and accurately, though he omitted one detail, understandably because more than likely he did not know it. Leavis said a copy was requested for himself, but Charles Porter had his

also

asked for

a library

shop could supply to students.

He

is

copy, or, indeed, copies that to be applauded for his cheek,

but he was certainly being disingenuous. His letter presumed that copies could be furnished to ‘registered’ students, but there was no such category. Anyone could attend Leavis’s lectures; many women did so,

though

only constitutionally on sufferance at Cambridge. The Office was alarmed that they could be exposed to Joyce. Leavis still

Home

was not lecturing

for a designated examination.

was Emmanuel College and paid-up

lectures

The sponsor of

students’ fees

went

his

to the

college, thence to Leavis. If the novel

was available to these students, and not merely had passages read from it, then the college would be sponsoring the circulation of an obscene book. It was not surprising that the Home Office was provoked

when

it

received Porter’s request, via the Chief Constable. It was disgusted at the prospect of ‘boy and girl undergraduates’ reading Ulysses, a

of

surely,

opera and

‘a

at

dangerous crank’, best interpreted as suitable for a Savoy worst - goodness knows. Active steps should be taken ‘to

prevent the lectures taking place

and the

Home

be brought but

scheme,

in.

.

The Cambridge

police investigated,

Office decided that the Director of Public Prosecutions Leavis never denied that he challenged the authorities,

was Charles Porter who, having entered the engagement with relish, landed him in trouble by his cheeky additional request. The Chief Constable duly made inquiries, discovering that it

is

clear

that

it

Leavis did not hold the rank of university Lecturer, though he gave

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

90

lectures for the English faculty,

also takes pupils privately

and that he

.

discovered that Leavis was planning a course on ‘Criticicism (so and 2nd spelled), to be attended by both men and women, ‘probably ist

He

He

year’.

assured the

Home

Ulysses

Office that

was not on

Cambridge bookshops - to the private regret of the constabulary - and that Leavis’s request was not a hoax.

The

sale

in

investigating

inquiry was in keeping with the current political climate. In 1923

William Joynson-Hicks with the (or ‘Jix’) became Home Secretary, enjoying greater popularity of police force than any other in the century. As an evangelical President

the Conservative Party

was returned

to office;

Church League, he used his powers to strengthen public morality. The Leavis-Porter initiative was therefore anti-evangelical in

the National

of Harry Leavis.

tradition

the

On

July

31

the

Director of Public

Prosecutions wrote to the administrative head of the university, the

Vice-Chancellor, Professor A.C. Seward, also Master of Downing Colwith lege. He asked for action, but ‘I am afraid that I am unacquainted

your

full

little,

at

authority in the University.’ (The remark this

apparatus of

date,

unable to

The ‘contemplated inclusion of must be avoided. Ot Ulysses, to use

make head

gross and indecent, ‘as

I

were understood

state.)

Leavis’s lectures’

am

university offices

suppose they

or

tail’.

unashamedly

may

a sign

is

But he could

a

see that

how

part ot the

as

this

of

book

in

Dr

colloquialism, it

I

was obviously

so in the last pages, the reminiscences

be called, of an

Irish

chamber-maid’.

He

offered

book to the Vice-Chancellor if he cared to request it. Professor Seward was not overly impressed. He replied calmly on 5 August that he did not think it necessary for the DPP to send him the

to dispatch the

book.

He promised

reporting that Leavis confessed to

now

which he did the next day, referring to Ulysses in a lecture and

to interview Leavis,

buy it.* ‘He would He had only asked Galloway & Porter to

promised not to recommend

never think of doing

so.’

acquire a copy for ‘illustrations and that critiques

The

DPP

comment

of the novel had appeared

The Times

in

his students to

in the

Literary Supplement, ‘possibly

replied with

some

ferocity.

Of

in his lectures’.

He added

Nation and Athenaeum and

on March course he

5

of this year

knew about

9 .

the

reviews of Ulysses, but he doubted that reviewers had ‘waded through its

732 pages’.

He warned

the Vice-Chancellor that

it

possession ot the

For the passage actually quoted by Leavis, see Chapter Six, Scrutiny: Guarding the Guardians, ‘Leaving Richards 1934

•

FREELANCE 1925-1926 book came

would

to his notice, he

91

made

prosecute, and

clear ‘that if

it

I

have to take any such steps, inevitably the source from which knowledge of the book arose will be known, and the publicity will hardly tend to increase the reputation of the university, or the subject matter of

At the

lectures’.

way

Office

this

in

Cambridge, saying

was thought

DPP

The

to address Vice-Chancellors’.

Constable

him

Home

that,

to be

also

although

it

its

model of the

‘a

wrote to the Chief

would be

difficult for

to get hard evidence

of references by Leavis to Ulysses he would be grateful of such reports as could be managed and, if necessary, he would ,

‘address a

communication

Dr

The Vice-Chancellor knew the Leavis family, whose shop was opposite Downing. It is likely that he passed the letter from the DPP across his desk to the young man. Leavis’s eye would have caught the sentence, ‘I do not pretend to be a critic of what is, as I suppose, literature, but The word ‘critic’ was to

Leavis personally’.

.

.’

.

scored out and replaced by ‘scrutineer’ in handwriting. inspiration for Scrutiny, but

It

was hardly the

was an amusing anticipation of it. 10 Professor Seward was not distressed by Leavis’s actions. Six years later Leavis became Director of Studies in English at Downing College, and a it

fellow four years after that. Seward clearly did not stand in the the appointments and

make

a

them.

connection between Leavis and the

distinguished botanist:

evolutionary growth.

The

may have encouraged like

Leavis,

He was

It

scientific

is

way of

tempting to

work of

this

he was preoccupied with organic

also an old

Emmanuel man.

story of Leavis and Ulysses acquired

some popular resonance. The

Granta once referred to the ‘Leavis Prize for Pornography’. Leavis was

thought to be his

a slightly

shocking

One

talker.

undergraduate asked for

opinion of Flecker’s Hassan, only to be told that

‘I

think

it’s

a

masturbation’, even though ladies were present.*

After the experiences of the

proposed

a

1926/7.

was not

It

summer

was not surprising

it

that Leavis

conventional sequence of lectures for the academic year of a

year in which to take

risks.

Cambridge English when he finished his dissertation, and its reorganization would give him the prospect of proper employment. In 1926 two drastic changes occurred: the university was divided into faculties so that there would now be an English Leavis expected reform of

Faculty, staffed

* ‘A masturbation’

by Lecturers with

is

a

salaries

period usage, comparable to

‘a

from

central funds;

nonsense’ today.

and the

EXCITING STRANGENESS

92

I9 2 5 _I 93

I

English Tripos was revised so that henceforth students could take a

purely ‘modern’, that

is,

a

course in literature from Chaucer onwards.

English Faculty was founded for the academic year beginning

The

October 1926. Twelve Lecturers were appointed, familiar faces from the group who had taught for the tripos since 1919. These new posts were full,

tenured lectureships, taking effect from

stipend for a Lecturer

those

who

salary

was

as

in if

was £200

a

October 1926. The

1

year but supplemented by

did not have a college fellowship. in the

region of

£350

a year,

The

though

basic

£150

tor

standard Lecturer’s

that

of

a

professor

was

£1,000. Eight of these appointments were relevant for Leavis that they were for the teaching of ‘modern’ English literature, and so one of these appointees ever left Cambridge, they could in theory be

much

as

replaced by an aspirant like himself. already

made an

appearance.

Q

The members of

of course retained

group have

this

his chair.

There was

LA. Richards, the lame Aubrey Attwater and the dapper Downs, and ‘Tilly’ (as the indefatigable Tillyard was called) and F.L. Lucas of King’s. Hilda Murray, who had sponsored Leavis as a

Manny

Forbes,

Girton supervisor, was appointed, becoming the first female university Lecturer in English, sitting on the Faculty Board and acting as examiner.

The most junior appointment was that of Stanley Bennett, who shared English teaching with Leavis at Emmanuel. The appointment of one only just senior to him showed how close to a proper lectureship Leavis was. He and Bennett had been momentarily on a level tooting when they were considered for the post of Director of Studies at Emmanuel. The professional gap between them began to widen when Bennett was elevated into one of the

new

lectureships.

But presently Leavis did make some progress. In January 1927 a second run of appointments was made, this time junior, temporary posts called probationary faculty lectureships.

was offered one of them. The

posts

There were

were

six posts

and Leavis

for a limited period

and not

renewable into permanencies; nor did the posts themselves necessarily survive their holders. The initial contracts were for between one and three years; Leavis’s

The

was

for

two

years.

other five probationers were Joan Bennett, Stanley’s wife (with a

two-year contract), T.R. Welsford and

Basil

Henn and

L.J.

Willey (one year). 11

It

(three

Potts

was

a

years),

Enid

family group: for

term of 1927 Henn, Joan Bennett and Leavis cycled to Girton to lecture to its English Club on the modern spirit in literature. The total group, permanent Lecturers and probationers, with

instance, in the Lent

FREELANCE I925— 1926

93

some few subtractions and additions - including Leavis, much later became the team that dominated Cambridge English for thirty-five years.

The second change of 1926 was There were

now

been only two

(

to be three sets

From

The modern

).

two-part

a

Part

tripos.

survey papers, with additions,

modern

was enlarged.

of examinations, when there had before

Modern

Early and

two, making material for literary history

that the curriculum

set

was divided

One was

as in the original

a

into

set

of

modern

were removed two of its examinations, on ‘Tragedy’ and the ‘History of Criticism’; they were put into Part Two, where they came to rest alongside new examination papers, the set.

that

set

‘English

Moralists’ (beloved of Critical

Comment

.

Q) and a paper ‘Passages of Prose and Verse, The third set, ‘Early Literature and History’,

mained much the same. The English Tripos was set in 1928.

first

Students could henceforth take

and

Two

diet

of examinations for the

for re-

new

wholly modern course in Parts One or substitute ‘Early Literature and History’ for one of these. It a

was rather unlikely that many would choose the harsh, linguistically demanding, older literature; but its master, H.M. Chadwick, did not mind. He wanted enthusiasts, and partly because of this he effected a third change in 1926. He decided he did not want his curriculum to remain within the English Faculty

at all.

He

requested, and

was allowed,

to take his subject to the Faculty

To some in

the

new

of Archaeology and Anthropology. regime was an improvement. Cambridge English,

strength as an analytical study of the

full

scriptures,

modern

British

without recourse to early culture or philology,

considered to date from

1926

when

its

tripos

secular

sometimes

is

was freed from early

cultures and linguistic study.

It

was

ary.

significant that Leavis

He

was,

as

we

shall see,

now

had

a

university post, albeit probation-

an intriguing lecturer. But talking from the

podium was not the peak of his work. In terms of impact on the student community lecturing was possibly exceeded by Leavis’s tutorial work as supervisor.

When

with Leavis and

Peter

his wife,

sun with pupils around students,

Greenham him on

and well known

Emmanuel, the don to

for

Newnham

whom

Q.D.L.

as

a

a

talked about the retirement portrait

said she

lawn.

would

He was

like to see

him

seen like this

in the

by many

small-group supervisor from 1925 for

and for Girton, the engagement he owed to he referred as ‘Miss Murray, “daughter of the

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

94

She

Dictionary"

with

cultural

a

also

had him

studies

slant

scholarship examinations for Girton,

set

the language of the late

(in

twentieth

Environment’ element. At the

‘Culture and

century)

or

women’s

colleges Leavis took students for poetry analysis in groups.

(in

his)

gave out typed

a

He poem by Edmund

usually beginning with a

sheets,

by Edward Thomas. ‘The excitement came later,’ said one student, ‘when he told us to buy T.S. Eliot’s Poems 1909-1925 .’ Having encouraged phrase-by-phrase commentary on ‘A Cooking Egg’, he went on to The Waste Land. Though Eliot was Blunden

‘Molecatcher’) or

(like

famous, he was believed to be awesomely highbrow. 12 At

Newnham

College the Director of Studies hoped that ‘young man’ would not ‘infiltrate’

Cambridge.

It

was

Masefield. 13

Flecker and John

Leavis saw

students

reading essays aloud

though on occasion he had done

He was tough on

bachelor

a

jargon, like ‘factor’, the sort of word, he said,

Some

,

sits

next to you

at tables

edges close and you edge away’.

who

cocoa

tells

open

his

and chases you

The former

the story of this ‘jug’ (the

session), did

‘With

pupils, not expecting a

man in a cricket shirt, were taken aback by Leavis’s farouche air. One young woman worried that his dog might get at her

man who man,

He

Girton pupil purchased large

Another described him, over cocoa, with

essay.

essays.

Emmanuel. 14 He discouraged

that he used himself in the History Tripos.

youngish

weekly

their

class

him, an Oxford practice,

to

this at

long essays, asking for only four sides paper.

undergraduates after

go through

individually, for ten minutes, to disliked

Rupert Brooke, James Elroy

the era of

still

hilarity: all

‘a

dirty

around, because he

Gwendolen FreeGirton word for a coffee or student

not go along with the idea that Leavis was

shirt

little

and high forehead,

[he]

impression of cleanliness.’* (Q.D.R. was one of the

me

gave

‘dirty’.

rather

the

girls at this ‘jug’.)

Supervisions were conducted in scruffy surroundings: the single bulb at

Newnham,

at

5

place after tea,

p.m. Foreign visitors found them bewildenngly informal.

American

girl

had been accustomed

week, systematic note-taking of

two long papers *

They took

the army-surplus hut at Girton.

a

all

at

Bryn

the items

Mawr

An

to five lectures a

on the

reading-lists

and

semester; she found the weekly class and essay at

Gwendolen Freeman was writing

to her

mother on

13

October 1926. Her

letters, at

Girton College, have plenty of out-of-school gossip about, for instance, Stanley Bennett’s

war

disability

(a

‘cork leg

which

creaks’),

and the rumour that

Q

was

‘a

frightful

drunkard, and will soon die of it’. Her memoir, Alma Mater (1990), published by Girton College,

is

vivid.

MODERNISM AND LECTURES I927-I928 Cambridge

refreshing.

essay very intensively.

taking

them

apart, ‘so

would allow her

95

Sometimes the supervisor did not annotate the What Leavis liked best was reading poems and that is what we did’. The American wished he

to read the

German

quotations

in

The Waste Land

because she thought he mispronounced them. 15 Leavis did not only teach the moderns. Pupils admired him on Shelley, and on Grierson’s Metaphysical Lyrics and Poems of the Seventeenth Century from Donne to Butler which had been a set-book from the early ,

tripos years,

tion of at

and

given extra authority by Eliot’s recommendaClark Lectures. Henri Fluchere, a visiting French student

in his

it

its

status

Cams College, found little on John Donne and was told that

Gonville and

Lecturer

illumination from the official

Leavis could help.

He

visited

Leavis, enchanted

who

cent,

went

by the ‘luscious apple-trees’ at Chesterton Hall Crestook him down to the boat-houses on the nearby river. They

for several

tow-path walks. (Leavis once dived dismayingly into the black Cam, emerging into a powerful crawl.) I

was happily surprised

at his

knowledge of French

we could talk of Flaubert, Proust, Baudelaire and so on. He even asked me (but that may have been later) to read aloud one of Baudelaire’s poems, just to see what the rhythm and music were like when spoken by someone with a French mouth. He told me of his friendship with Andre Chevrillon, literature;

fluently

the academician,

who

had published enjoyable and

poets.

16

still

valuable essays on English writers and

Fluchere was most impressed by Lcavis’s explication of Shelley’s ‘When the Lamp is Shattered and the way he was ‘brilliantly at ease’ with ,

Donne’s Songs and

Sonets.

translated into French

He had

Leavis’s

first

long essay published,

by himself.*

Modernism and Lectures 1927—1928 In

October 1927,

now

established at the start of a career, Leavis

went

ahead with the all-modern course of lectures he had planned. He started the year with ‘Twentieth Century Poetry’, then two terms of lectures called Critics and Critical Problems In the following year he .

* La poesie anglaise

Sud (October

1930).

ct lc It

monde modemc:

formed the

basis

of the

(1928/9)

etude de first

la

situation actucllc’, Les Cahiers du

chapter of New Bearings

in English Poetry.

—

EXCITING STRANGENESS 92 5

96

1

dropped one of

1

93

1

his criticism series, substituting ‘Prose,

with Passages tor

Criticism’ for a term, a course following the publication of Herbert 17 Read’s English Prose Style (1928).

He gave

these lectures for four years,

was the programme (contemporary poetry, critical theory, prose analysis) on which his early reputation was founded. In that autumn Leavis took up his part as spokesman on contemporary writing. A certain electricity was created. A student could attend a poetry reading by Edith Sitwell on one day, and on the next

down

of 1931, and

to the spring

this

Gwendolen Freeman wrote to ‘queerly with enormous beady

hear Leavis speak about her in a lecture. her parents that Sitwell was dressed things round her neck. She then read

some

rather

mad

things perfectly

beautifully and explained the wonderful technique ot her work.’ In his lecture Leavis

Beyond

the

was not amused. According

power of evoking

childish

to

Freeman:

memories and

sense into another, like ‘shrieking light’, Edith hadn’t

translating terms of

much

message, nor had her brothers, and he quite squashed her.

as poet.

We

one

She had no

wished Edith had

been there. 18

model of the

Leavis excoriated Sir John Squire, ‘the

philistine

everyone goes on about’. Freeman was charmed by Leavis he also supervised her.

Now,

at the

He was

when he came

him, with

The

in the

war and had shell-shock

out he couldn’t speak

most, they say, he can only eat

frightfully at times. his

He

as a lecturer;

He was

quite an exciting person.

badly, so that

that

is

also

going

at all

two meals

a bit bald,

a

or eat

frightfully

at all for ages.

day and he stammers

forehead upwards, which makes

19 other features, look rather like an angelic Puck.

lectures

had

a

reputation for intensity, and tor being inspired by

February 1928 an undergraduate paper reviewed one lecture in series on critical problems. Its opening theme, observed the writer

Eliot. In his

was played by the Sacred fLood-wind, to be joined on the by the ‘Credo’ of Murry. The lecture was haunted by occasional

facetiously,

brass

harping allusions to ‘the old-fashioned, emotional Pater nostrum’. The ‘Andante’ contained the Richards theme. The reviewer scolded Leavis for his

awkward

stressing that

Dr

delivery ‘from manuscript’.

no one

else

impossible to obtain elsewhere. Moreover, critical

theory

respectful,

shared his material or approach.

Leavis’s lectures contain a great variety

modern

But he was

may

of interesting matter which it

is

not uninteresting to see

it

is

how

be applied to various problems which have been

MODERNISM AND LECTURES I927-I928 the source of so inclined to

much

discussion in the past.

Dr

Leavis

97

perhaps rather too

is

back on Eliot, Murry or Richards, and to condemn

tall

criticism. Nevertheless,

past being pulled

all

previous

certainly stimulating to hear the great critics of the limb, rather than be obliged to sit and listen to the

it is

limb from

method of giving laudatory puffs to anyone who has an established reputation. Dr Leavis’s method requires courage and confidence and he usual safe

does

not lack these

more

One

startling denunciations

Leavis does

ounded

make out

at

times

of such

feels inclined to rebel against

some of his Sainte-Beuve and Lamb, but Dr

critics as

strong case and the fact that his arguments are always on the works of the authors themselves makes them a

unassailable

own

By

qualities.

on

his

premises.

‘works’ the reviewer must

opposed to

mean examples of

their concepts only.

stammer, but

his delivery

20

the authors’ prose, as

In lectures, apparently, Leavis did

was not smooth; he had

a ‘special voice’,

not

with

a slight ‘rasping quality’. 21

the

In

spring

of 1927 Leavis attended the Clark Lectures again,

delivered that year

October

King

as Aspects of the

Forster.

The

Novel, paving the

Extremely popular with

s.

called

by E.M.

‘the intelliganzanettes’,

efforts. Leavis, as typically,

a

lectures

way

were published

to Forster’s fellowship at

largely female audience,

Forster

was

was ‘astonished

in

typically

which he

modest about

his

at the intellectual nullity’

of

the lectures. His harsh

view may have evolved over the years, but there was certainly similar criticism when they were delivered. Ford Madox Ford wrote an essay on them called ‘Cambridge on the Caboodle’, reproving the

brilliant novelist for

writing in an amiably middlebrow

way about

the art of the novel, as if for Punch. Leavis himself had one objection to Aspects of the Novel understandable in a professional teacher.

The book at

once became

seized as

on the

good

as

a

nuisance:

distinction

all

the girls’ school English mistresses in England

between

flat

and round characters - which

anything the book did yield

critically.

I

responsible for the ‘English’ teaching at Girton and

He was

irritated

by

Forster’s whimsicality

speak as one

Newnham.

after

who was

all

was

largely

22

and disappointed by the casual

treatment of novelists he admired intensely, like Joseph Conrad and Henry James. Late in life (1974) Leavis thought Forster acquiesced too

much

in the lectures to

writers,

Bloomsbury taste. ‘To treat James and Conrad (both of whom had

the

two

great living

no recognition that

mattered to them), with that characteristic coterie-stupid and charming

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-193I

98

(“tolerant”) condescension

himself have done.

The

Him

find

I

I

can’t forgive

and Virginia Woolf: the

— nor would Blake Incomparable Max.

was cut according to Forster’s friendships in Gordon Square. Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson’s fantasy

cloth for the lectures

King’s and in

The Magic Flute (1920) received unexpected praise, contrary to Forster s private opinion. Forster was anxious that Virginia Woolf should not see the proofs of Aspects of the Novel until he had cut ‘a criticism of her

work which

of Henry James,

in the revise!!’ In the case

have modified

I

Forster used a strategy of criticism that Leavis detested: he praised

H.G.

Wells’s parody in Boon of the late Jamesian prose style. Leavis believed

Wells read James obtusely. Forster’s somewhat conventional approval of parody struck into Leavis’s aesthetic. Ordinarily, parody is thought to

throw

a shaft

of light amusingly on

a literary style.

But Leavis could

hardly be expected to think parody was instructive: he believed (as a late Romantic) that the stylistic handwriting of an original writer could not

be faked, so parodic imitation that exaggerated mannerisms only showed up on a screen of comedy what was peripheral. Paste jewellery, he bore no relation to the molecular structure of the real thing, so parody could teach no real lessons. Leavis could not believe in ‘learning by parody’, and thought the exercise flattered parodist and

would

say,

demeaned

reader but

the

(Leavis’s suspicion

artist.

of the concept of

parody underlay his dislike of Max Beerbohm: he disliked not his gaiety but a smug presumption that parody could capture a real style.) None the less, Leavis thought that Forster had performed at least one valuable service in his lectures on the novel: the dispatch of George

Meredith to

literary critical

limbo

in a passage in

which Forster was

at

most acute and resolute: ‘What with the taking, what with the and what with the home counties posing as the universe, preaching did say Meredith it is no wonder Meredith now lies in the trough.’ He

his

.

was

a

.

.

‘great novelist’

- but

as

the ‘finest contriver’ or plot-maker in

English fiction.

In the spring

of 1928 Leavis’s

first

professional disappointment occurred.

Because of the imminent retirement of G.G. Coulton and because student

numbers had

appoint three

new

risen,

Lecturers.

the English Faculty

was

They were T.R. Henn,

in

L.J.

May

able to

Potts and Enid

Wclsford - not Leavis. 24 Welsford belonged to the pre-war generation:

was an ‘Early and Modern English’ scholar ot the Chadwick persuasion and a natural replacement tor Coulton. Her appointment was

she

MODERNISM AND LECTURES 1927-1928 part time (called to

to at

work

99

25

But Henn and Potts had been appointed probationcrships at the same time as Leavis and anyway were junior Leavis, graduates of 1922 and 1923. Potts had gone into a fellowship Queens’; Henn had taken the road of prizes (Charles Oldham Shakepart

speare Scholarship, the Ph.D. as a vital

Later Leavis

).

Members’ Prize). ‘No one,’ he step on the academic ladder.’ 26

was tamously

said later, ‘thought

of

about the slow progress of his career, bitterness contested by the suggestion that he had had unrealistic expectations. Were not probationary posts genuinely probationary, carrying no guarantee of promotion?

bitter

A moment

Tom

Henn’s memoirs renders this interpretation ot events questionable. Recounting the story of his own promotion, he makes an odd slip, dating his recruitment to the in

English Faculty to 1926 and the ‘general mass appointment’, that is of twelve Lecturers and six probationers. But Henn was not part of the initial

faculty establishment: his

from

tion

a

been due to

probationership a little vanity.

appointment came

(as

was

More

Potts’s).

later,

and was promo-

Henn’s error

may have

and more understandable, he was conscious of a pool of Lecturers, some senior and some junior, who were expected to join the seniors, with a moral right to do so as they had mostly been doing the day-to-day English teaching before the likely,

was invented. He did not see two sharply defined grades. Henn’s and Potts’s promotions illustrated the beginning of a trend towards appointing Lecturers from the pool of probationers. It was not, therefore, unreasonable for Leavis to expect that promotion lectureship system

would come before

long.

The

English Faculty consisted of

feel

of the situation

in

1926—8 was that the

block of Lecturers and probationers, the

a

probationers not temporary or in transit but waiting, with fair expectations, in the wings. Leavis waited with two others, Joan Bennett and Basil Willey, and he and Bennett waited an unconscionable time. Leavis’s lack

juncture.

It

was

valued highly.

Cambridge

of promotion was not manifestly inequitable actually true, if Leavis,

also,

wrong,

was not

argot), perhaps because he

that doctoral

‘pot-hunter’

a

was

a

at

this

work was not (prize-seeker

in

blocked writer. Further, he

was unlucky or unshrewd in his choice of academic specialization. He withdrew from eighteenth-century studies, for which there was not

much demand, but he did not then offer in which much teaching was needed into

contemporary poetry, and

history

of

literary

criticism,

as

lectures (like

Shakespeare).

literary criticism a

Tillyardian

on one of the periods

He went

- but he scorned

area

the

(Longinus-Charles

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

100

Lamb— Sainte-Beuve:

Tillyard’s

short

one on Lamb). He

field

put

thinker of this time and place. that

innovator? In

came

researcher

a

literature

that

A

is,

up with the

scientific

analogy

relevant:

is

wants to work with the most

is

it

brilliant

when

it

have been thought too

to planning lecture schedules, Leavis could

close to the specialism

a

liveliest literary

Leavis was something of a scientist. But,

this,

was

dealt with problems, not periods. His choice of

him alongside Richards,

surprising

book on English

first

of the innovator, and that there could be only one

LA. Richards.

Terms 1928—1929

Precarious Leavis had

now

new

a

spur to ambition. At a Girton tea-party, presided

woman

over by Stanley Bennett, he met the

he was to marry, Queenie

Dorothy Roth, in the autumn of 1927. The period began in which they were ‘gay, good-looking and hopeful’, as she put it late in life when she wished there was some memoir to tell their children of the life that had been. It

may

be legend that Q.D.R. attracted the attention of Leavis by

approaching him there

is

a

after a lecture to ask,

private joke in her

remarks that

‘the

question

book

“What

‘Dr Leavis, what

of the

critic’.

a

is

interest

Queenie began

alertness

who

clearly fascinated

sociable with the other

whom

she could talk about the

possessed, in Muriel

Bradbrook’s words,

of Emelia Motrez, sold peanuts

Edmonton, the satellite country-town, but like Cambridge was strange. To a degree, another England.

It

Leavis:

became much more

[which was] even to our unpractised eyes

sister

by

became aware of

a

‘cocksure

a defensive

wanness’.

Q.D.R. was absorbed too by Leavis’s work, which had for her as a young woman who knew of London Augusta,

in

the period recall, not altogether kindly, the

Girton students, keen to have people to supervisor

settled,

of most of us and the

to take in clothes after Leavis

her. In her third year she

where she

poem?” had been

The young woman was

some female memories of

poetry?’ If so,

(dedicated to ‘F.R.L.’)

Principles of Literary Criticism, to the satisfaction relief

is

was Leavis

who

was not long out of the Fens and,

to it

a special interest

(her

in Petticoat

whom

a

great-aunt

Lane) and

provincial city

was an introduction

to

taught her to bicycle. His family

living with his

mother

in the untidy,

garden-surrounded house, just outside the village of Chesterton, Leavis

PRECARIOUS TERMS I928-I929 must have

still

what English ot

seemed

country person. She could have hardly

When

dissenting chapel culture’ was.

she took to

it,

a

101

was made aware

she

John Bunyan with enthusiasm.* Her

known

own

family was,

we

saw, Jewish orthodox. (In the other branch her Uncle Abraham had first educated his children into secularism, until he was exasperated as

by what he

her.

Jesus Christianity’ of school scripture

was henceforth the synagogue for the children.) Leavis was another country for Q.D.R. he also could learn from Q.D.R. was a writer, and Leavis was not a fluent one. When he Q.D.R. he had written nothing since his doctoral dissertation,

lessons; then II

Jimmy

called the it

perhaps could not; he eschewed the ‘right thing to do’, which was to enter for essay prizes. But in

November

said excitedly to a friend, in the

Girton provided for the use of

writing again’,

‘he’s

Q.D.R.

waiting-room off King’s Parade

its

students between lectures.

that

was

It

a

short review for the Cambridge Review of a novel, The Dark Breed by the Irish writer F.R. Higgins, and of Osbert Sitwell’s England Reclaimed. ,

She knew

a

good

deal of England,

from

the

London

end, but

came

in

contact with the provincially rural in Cambridge, and the factor of ‘Englishness’ that later

meant

so

much

Contemporaries say that Q.D.R. last

to

fell

both partners. in love

with Leavis during her

year at Girton, an anguished one because Leavis was slow to

his feelings.

But by the end of term they came

Q.D.R. graduated with

to an understanding.

many of her examination

a starred First,

show

And

papers

showing marks well above 80 per cent. 27 Leavis urged her to put in for scholarships. She was awarded the Charity Reeves and the Thomas Montefiore Prizes so she could go ahead to do research for a Ph.D., like ‘the doctor’ as she called

work on

a

him. She registered

study ot popular fiction, indeed,

dissertation; hers

was published

She covered the

later

when

ground

in

1932

as a

a sequel to Leavis’s

as Fiction

that Leavis

research student to

and

the

own

Reading Public. f

omitted from

his dissertation

the authorities agreed (after Q’s petition) that the scope could be

Q.D.L. was successively supervised by Richards inspiration), by George Rylands and by Forbes. contracted.

(the second

Leavis continued, in the academic year 1928/9, with his three courses of lectures

*

Q

on poetry,

D.L. liked reading

Dolls) to her children.

t Sec Chapter Four,

criticism

By now

Damon Runyon’s Broadway

Runyon’s

We

and prose.

characterization

Were Cambridge,

is

it

was

clear that the

stones (the origin of Guys and

not so different from that of Bunyan.

‘Pioneer Performances 1932’.

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

102

He

Faculty was not enthusiastic about him. this

academic year, and to one gaffe

dated his unpopularity to

in particular.

member of

the Cambridge Review criticizing a

He wrote

a piece in

the English Faculty and

fellow of King’s, F.L. Lucas.

was

the late 1920s he

trom

Lucas’s reputation has not lasted, but

a

a

few readers having been introduced

his anthologies like

Greek Drama for Everyman. In 1919

J.M. Keynes introduced him to Clive

him ‘Bloomsbury’. The young John Lehmann liked to

prolific

and entertaining writer, not

by

to the classics

Lucas’s

word

for

it

was

‘hedonist’.

venture out from Trinity, the society of Lucas in lived

a

28

who

Bell,

comparatively

what he

called

staid college, to

King’s and

‘Bloomsbury-by-the-Cam’. Lucas

called

opposite King’s, across the Backs, with his wife (the novelist

E.B.C., or ‘Topsy’ Jones), where, said Lehmann, one could

openly, and

talk

modern

poetry and

novels, and (once one had plucked

unburden one’s heart of chuckle or

a

of passion and wit about modern

to talk

listen

all

sympathetic

that

had choked

comment

it,

up courage)

while ‘Topsy’ uttered

showed how exactly

that

a

freely

throaty

she understood

what one was going through - even though her Freudian interpretations and pagan suggestions for remedy dismayed on occasion a sensibility still too tender for this bracing air

29 .

was not bracing enough for the poetry of T.S. Eliot, to which Lucas was openly hostile. At King’s he was Librarian, and it was rumoured that he would not authorize purchases of Eliot. 30 His hostility simply explained: he was old-fashioned and romantic; Eliot was is

This

air

‘advanced’ and

classical.

It

is

worth pausing over the nature of

this

difference, because Lucas represented a large sector ot anti-Eliot opinion,

the

same

sector that

seriously’. If this sector it

opposed Leavis: is

disliked ‘taking literature too

it

characterized as hedonist rather than intellectual,

could be said that Eliot went eventually over to the hedonists; so the

alliance

with him for which Leavis longed could never occur.

Why Eliot

in

Lucas disliked Eliot a

imposed on

is

illustrated

I.A.

Richards said of

demands which poetry

passage quoted earlier about the high

the poet

reader, the ‘right reader’, in

creates a

his

‘unified response’. Richards believed to bring

by what

it

was the job of

untutored readers up to the level of

literary criticism

‘best qualified opinion’

and

defend that opinion against anti-intellectualism. Criticism should combat a

philistinism

persons’.

that

appeals to herd instinct,

Lucas was an anti-intellectual,

that

disliking

hatred ot ‘superior ‘superior

persons’.

PRECARIOUS TERMS I928-I929 Strange to find really,

103

don turned English Lecturer as populist? Not Lucas, Greek and Roman literature was the study,

classics

because for

genuinely superior. Eliot’s subtleties and plagiarisms, always irritating to the classic, expressed refinements of consciousness that had no authority.

For Lucas,

Homer was

archaic, mysterious but eventually accessible

study; Eliot’s obscurities ist

were merely recent

factitious devisings.

by

Modern-

obscurity was parvenu. In 1928 an

appeared

anonymous review of

in the

New

reviewer patronized

Eliot’s essays

Statesman and Nation.

For Lancelot Andrewes

was certainly by Lucas. The volume written by a man who is

this ‘pleasant little

It

evidently fond of reading, generally reads with intelligence, and can always express his opinions with fire and lucidity’. Beta-plus for Eliot.

Lea vis complained about the review

Review Leavis

February 1929

A Reply author. Much

in a piece called ‘T.S. Eliot:

believed

Lucas was

challenge was to

English that

in

don

in

‘a

its

contemptuous

was undoubtedly by Lucas.

English studies too seriously:

It

would

s

Life

and

complained

Cambridge

Condescending’. he said that

later

dismissal [of Eliot]

Mr Desmond MacCarthy 31

to the

in the

by

Cambridge

a

Letters'

his

,

a dismissal

that universities took

young man spent his time reading The Earthly Paradise on his back in a punt (I do not say he could not do better) than stewing over the Criterion In memory, Leavis conflated the two pieces, attributing to Lucas authorship of the review I

far rather a

.’

of For Lancelot Andrewes

theme and tone Lucas

who was

32 .

Lucas’s Life and Letters piece

was

similar in

of the other. So Leavis thought he was attacking that time all over the journals: ‘Life and Letters

to that at

publishes twenty or

more pages of F.L. Lucas a month,’ wrote Leavis. 33 Having attacked Lucas, he was made to realize he had committed a scandalous impropriety’. The editor of the Cambridge Review ‘was left in no doubt

as to the

unforgivableness of the offence’.

whether Lucas was offended and

if

so

We

cannot

know

whether the offence affected

Leavis professionally. But Lucas did subsequently retaliate in 1932 by launching an attack on the whole Leavisian position, choosing as his

point of focus Q.D.L.’s Fiction and the Reading Public.

The

substance of Leavis

s

‘Reply to the Condescending’ dealt with the

author’s version of a familiar subject, the obscurity of contemporary poetry, and specifically the practice of recondite quotation in Eliot’s

poetry. Lucas had contended that ‘super-literate’ poetry was popular

only with young people ‘whose reading begins with the Edwardians’. Leavis said Lucas condescended to Eliot’s allusiveness from the vantage

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

104

point of a conventional

among many. For

of one obscure modern

poetry in the essay

was

least like

Mr

was unique,

that Eliot’s poetry

was used ‘dynamically’, nor that

neither understanding that Eliot’s learning

classic,

he

Eliot’s:

to disentangle Eliot

Leavis there was ‘no other

an originator’. 34

is

certainly not

The aim of

from other modernisms, including

his

Eliot-like

ones.* There was plenty of Eliotism on display in the Cambridge Review

month

in the

when

following,

verse, Cambridge Poetry ig2Q.

iS

Leavis reviewed an annual round-up of

He

Richard Eberhart and Richards’s pupil

A contemporary

two young

singled out at

Magdalene, William Empson.

mentions [Empson]

said, ‘Leavis

poets for praise,

in

every

lecture.’

36

February 1929 Leavis became engaged to be married to Queenie Roth. Later she recalled Leavis’s gallantry and tenderness, characterizing In

it

by quoting from

a

poem by Laurence Binyon:

O world, be nobler for her sake! If she

but

knew

What wrongs

thee

what thou

what deeds

are borne,

In thee, beneath thy daily sun.

At the time Leavis was

During

their

company was

a

reader of

engagement he wrote

art,

are

done

37

Housman’s

A

Shropshire

Lad.

to her every day: his delight in her

noticed by an undergraduate

who was

sharing a score of

when Leavis turned up. 38 But it was not surprising that Morris and Jenny Roth in Edmonton were shocked that their daughter had decided to ‘marry out’. They were proud of their two children at Cambridge, and had even moved house, Cesar Franck with her, in college over

up

further

Silver Street, in order to

entertain the children’s

tea,

have somewhere better

Cambridge

friends.

in

which

Overwhelmed with

to

grief,

the parents ceased to take responsibility for their daughter, the breach

affirmed with most determination by Q.D.L.’s mother, whose family

was more

religious than Morris’s.

shiva for her, that

ances

at

is,

underwent

It

has been said that the family

strict

the betrayal of their religion.

sat

household bereavement observ-

It is

not likely that

this

happened.

But contact ceased between Queenie and her parents, except occasionally with Morris Roth. Q.D.R. *

A

now had

only her Cambridge friends to rely

made the same point about imitators of Eliot more poems of Sherard Vines, Professor of English at the

couple of months earlier Q.D.R.

wittily,

at

the expense of the

University College

in Hull:

poems came hot from

‘Those interested

in

poetry

may complain

the blast furnace, [these) arc issued

that while Eliot’s

by the Mosaics Manufacturing

Co.’ Her review was called ‘Sour Grapes from the Waste Land’.

PRECARIOUS TERMS I928-I929

105

on. She turned to her research-supervisor, Richards,

He and

Magdalene.

now

fellow of

a

wife were returning from an honorary degree ceremony to their house in Chesterton Road when they found Q.D.R. waiting for them, sheltering from the pouring rain among his

the garden

They were embarrassed

shrubs.

to hear

all

the details of

and curiously found future contact almost impossible.

why

they withdrew

was not surprising

It

daughter

remarked

It

plight

hard to see

is

39 .

that the

Roth family

reacted harshly to their

engagement. But neither was it surprising that she chose contemporary at Girton and sensible observer, also Jewish,

s

A

Leavis.

point

at this

Q.D.R. ’s

that

Q.D.R. was

for Leavis

near-perfect mate,

‘a

who met

all

the needs, physical, emotional and intellectual and this in the period between the wars known as the Age of the Million Surplus

Two

Women, on account War L. It was the Bertrand Russell

Q.D.R As

40 .

rationalist ideas

easy to see

It is

married

a

s

of the wholesale slaughter of young men in World era of George Bernard Shaw’s ‘Life Force’, and

man

it

why

Q.D.R. ’s vacant

was suffering

the

took an interest

in his career.

He was aware

a

as

he was

in

to be a post

University of Leeds where the Professor of English,

Abercrombie, had been appointed

Cambridge

to a position in

London. At

inquiries about a possible successor

Vice-Chancellor, and

name

Q

for Leavis to secure a

breakdown, deeply involved alienation from her family. There was going

at

Lascelles

Leavis was attracted.

became an urgent matter

permanent appointment. that Leavis

about marriage, which appealed to

Q

to be put forward.

were made through the wondered whether Richards might allow his

He

quizzed him in the (only) Cambridge

taxi,

discovered he was not interested and weighed up Richards’s suggestion that Leavis might be recommended. was relieved that Richards

Q

wanted

explained in I

am

Cambridge, but he was doubtful about Leavis, as he letter (some of which was quoted above in Chapter Two).

to stay in

really

a

sorry for him, having watched (from

a

distance)

this

tragedy

coming on ‘From a distance’ for this reason - was his supervisor for Ph.D. and no small part of that job was steering him clear of nervous breakdown. Once think twice - got the Board to abbreviate the scope of his thesis and consent I

I

I

was extremely anxious about him to the last moment. And then he never even gave me the opportunity of congratulating him to his altering

never

its title.

called, or

I

wrote, - nor have

my

prayers for

it.

I

gather that

in

I

seen

him

since he carried

away

his

your opinion he has since been making good, and

I

MS

with

hear that

,

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

106

must, then, have improved. But (frankly) he must have improved quite beyond my old estimate — which is the only one he succeed has allowed me to go upon - before I could recommend him as fit to

his lectures are well attended.

He

one of Abercrombie’s

As

the root of it

Forgive

I

say,

have seen

I

if

my

words about him

strike

you

tragedy coming on: and

no good fortune would

be, since

too hard.

as

of trouble to get Leavis better placed, thankless

would

this

the man’s Self-Sufficiency.

is

me

quality.

as that

1

would

take a lot

trouble (you

easily equal his sense

of his

know)

deserts.

41

may have thought well of Leavis, or knew he needed money; or he may have wanted him out of Cambridge: broadly speaking it was the Cambridge way to lead promising graduates into its system. But in Richards

this

exchange there

no suggestion

is

that either

or Richards was

Q

convinced Cambridge English should keep Leavis at all costs. (None the in less, when Richards was asked by Eliot himself who was any good

Cambridge, Leavis was the only Lecturer he

on

and general

literary

coming here under about

difficulties for’.)

man who

a Jesus

Lower Second to find a

critical matters,

but

good supervisor shouldn’t say he was worth

specified,

I

‘a

Q concluded his letter with

remark

a

did poorly in classics in 1928, taking only a

in English in 1929;

he

now

job for him. The reference to

found he had to ‘write about’

this

predicament shows that

Q

did not feel a need to ‘write about’ to place Leavis, but this does not

mean he thought

permanent lectureship was on the

a

anyway, there was the years.

And

the

two

possibility

He knew,

of another couple of probationary

further years for Leavis

of 1929 Leavis’s contract was extended,

were granted.

as

In the

autumn

were the contracts of Joan

October 1931. progress through marriage and academe differed from

Bennett and Basil Willey. All three were Leavis’s

cards.

the Bennetts.

It

safe until

was much more unsteady than

that

that

of

of the comparatively

wealthy parents of Joan

easy-going evolution of the Bennetts:

the

Frankau had no

modest and charming Stanley

Bennett,

difficulty in accepting a

who had

to a lectureship.

the

But

good fortune at least

to be appointed early

and deservedly

Leavis was advancing on the professional

young William Empson, the other British critical genius of the century, was ejected from it. After mathematics, Empson’s starred First in Part One of English earned him a junior fellowship at Magdalene. At the end of July it was discovered that he had had a woman in his rooms, and condoms were discovered by a college path, whereas in 1929

servant.

I.

A. Richards would have pleaded his cause in college, but he

was away climbing

in the

Bernese Oberland. ‘Struck otf the boards

PRECARIOUS TERMS 1928-1929

Empson was forbidden soon entered

a

enterprises,

to live within the

twenty-year

Empson and

China.

107

exile,

Cambridge boundaries. He with some furloughs, in Japan and

were both caught out in free-thinking Leavis with the importation of Ulysses, Empson in the use of

contraceptives. 42

It

Leavis

possible that the

is

more psychologically

vulnerable.

A

Wykehamist Empson was the mildly bohemian undergraduate but

with gentry manners, he was less experienced than Leavis; conventional upper-class expectations were painfully

his fairly

by

jolted

the

episode.

F.R.L. and Q.D.R. planned to marry before the Michaelmas term. Because of the breach with her parents, Q.D.R. had nowhere to be married from, so she lodged in Leys Road with an acquaintance with whom she had been up at Girton. Dorothy Wooster had also ‘married her don’, a university demonstrator in crystallography. Leavis bought a little

terrace house in Leys

Road

for about a thousand pounds, a

of terraces to the north-west of the

estate

know

got to

Leavis

when he went

prize essay

on contemporary

Road:

parents had

his

river.

him

to

modern

Lionel Knights,

who

for advice about writing a

literary criticism,

moved

43

was

familiar with Leys

from Grantham. (He had been

there

entranced by the cultural charm of life in the city, after the drab surroundings of his youth: there was no music or painting in small-town

Q.D.R.

Lincolnshire.)

believed in

engagements’. Leavis wrote to her every day until the wedding on 16 September, on which he arrived from his mother’s house very early to take her to the Register ‘trial

Office.

groom

Bride and

left after

the

ceremony

for a bicycling

and walking

holiday in Norfolk. Q.D.L. remembered seeing ‘whole haystacks being quanted along on wherries by aged men with side whiskers’.

My

husband asked one such if he would slowly and politely, ‘No thank ’ee, sir, I’m and

I’ll

have

a

cup of tea with

her’ ...

like a

just

cup of

going

tea;

whoom

he replied very to

my

beloved,

My

husband’s grandfather, Elihu Leavis, lived in a cottage in the village of Denver, near Denver Sluice, roasting his meat

on

a spit at

the

open

fire,

and you could

of course he had

a

On

out Leavis read

the

train

up the open chimney, and

well in the garden. 44

Kreutzer Sonata, slightly

Leys Road, the couple first in

see the stars

volume of Tolstoy, including The alarming the well-read bride. Back home in

fitted

a

out their

home

to be easy to care for, the

the road to have a type of synthetic-fibre carpeting on the

stairs.

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

108

The Woosters gave them

plants

‘Gwalias’ and the ‘Gardenias’, the

on

inscribed

and

The couple now began

Leavis house

name of the

‘The Criticastery

a placard:

Among

Japanese print.

a

was

the

jovially

.

to entertain modestly, inviting undergraduates

and others to regular tea parties at 4 p.m. on Fridays, much appreciated by students from abroad. Later Q.D.L. noted a succession ot turbans bobbing along the garden-hedge. An occasional visitor was the philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein,

one of the Friday

who

had returned

Cambridge

to

in 1929.

At

he was mistaken tor an undergraduate, though he

teas

45 Leavis was perhaps reminded of his own was then at least forty. anomalous position: older than a graduate student, in his late thirties, but

with hardly more

The

status.

met him through

after Leavis

from Wittgenstein began

visits

friendship with the elderly philosopher,

his

W.E. Johnson, who supervised

Wittgenstein before the war. Leavis had been at the Perse with Johnson’s son, Stephen. Johnson and his sister held Sunday afternoon at-homes,

and

at

knew I

one of them Leavis encountered Wittgenstein,

ot

whom

he then

nothing.

He had

ran on and clashed with Wittgenstein.

and

(1929),

know

didn’t

I

and Wittgenstein

fell

his

name. Johnson

s

innocent

on one another’s necks

followed Wittgenstein out and offered to

fall

just returned to

at

first

on him

myth was

Cambridge that

meeting’. Actually,

supposing that

,

Leavis

my

I

well-

make that natural. To my surprise he put his hand on my ‘We must know one another.’ I said (did I?? - anyway, I

earned rebuke would shoulder and

don’t see the necessity’, and walked pointedly the other way. But not thereafter, for a year or so, used to call on me pretty frequently. I’m

thought):

he

said:

and the connection lapsed.

recessive,

The

‘I

reason

why

Leavis offered to

How

can

I

his eyes, that

tend to

have suffered

a lot

my

off,

said:

I

on’ Wittgenstein

was comic. He

to remonstrate because a

young

a

Although Wittgenstein had

With

‘fall

Schubert song, politely asked Wittgenstein to German, only to receive the brusque retort, ‘How can I? possibly ?’ Loftily departing, an indignant Leavis pursued him.

about to sing

correct his

didn’t talk philosophy.

room

followed him out of the music visitor,

We

hand on

make you uncomfortable’,

from holding

my

collar as if

‘You behaved

said [he thought!

‘those intensely white

was

Leavis said his piece.

to (‘I

back.’)

(I

later realized)

in a disgraceful

the youth

and large surrounds

were about

to take

my

coat

young man.’ Wittgenstein To which I returned, emphatically

way

foolish.

I

to that

PRECARIOUS TERMS I928-I929 containing myself: ‘You right to treat

anyone

may have

like that.’

done, you

was

It

may have

109 done, but you had no

to this that Wittgenstein replied,

‘We

must know one another.’

Once

acquainted, they

with Wittgenstein

went

agoraphobic

restless,

exhausted by study. In

for walks, mostly at night

his late

Cambridgeshire scene forms

and down-river,

(so Leavis believed)

memoir ‘Memories of

and often

Wittgenstein’ the

grand setting for Leavis’s account of their excursions: the ‘Bellevue’ boat-house at the end of Mill Lane, steamorgans of the rural Trumpington Feast, the nine-foot furrows of ground by the Granta River opposite Lingay Fen. Leavis said - yarning, it sounds - that they were once ‘a resort of mammoths’ a

which

in

had been found before the war. ‘Wittgenstein didn’t need coprolites had their use in the manufacture of munitions.’

One light

recollection in

on the

Memories

of Wittgenstein’

fossils

telling that

throws an oblique

and the philosopher. Leavis was a popular Lecturer and supervisor; he was chirpy company.* But the chemistry of pedagogy did not always work and one pupil, the ‘bearer of a distinguished Victorian

critic

name

result that there

(that

were

is,

‘things said’,

had come to an end’.

proved to be bumptious with the meaning, Leavis decided, ‘the relation

Rossetti),

One of

the things

was

strange. Rossetti’s parting

shot to Leavis was, ‘You’re like Jesus Christ.’ Later Rossetti happened to tell Wittgenstein that he idolized his former supervisor. Wittgenstein

passed this back to Leavis,

who

remained impassive. ‘I don’t really care what Rossetti thinks of me.’ ‘You ought to care,’ Wittgenstein exclaimed. Then Leavis retailed Rossetti’s remark about being like Christ. Wittgenstein was amazed. That s an extraordinary thing to say!’ he exclaimed. It was Leavis s turn to be taken aback — at Wittgenstein’s capacity for

wonder:

‘It

was

a

spontaneity of

of the whole being.’

By now them

uttering a

judgement expressive

46

Leavis had been

freelance. Flc

recall,

a

university teacher for five years,

was beginning

some of

to see his pupils succeeding. In 1927,

under the influence of Bennett and Leavis, men from Emmanuel took remarkable five out of the nine Firsts in English. Among the nine

a

there

were two non-Emmanuel men sympathetic Ian

Parsons of Trinity

* Geoffrey ae used

it

Walton

says he

(later

his

publisher)

was more ‘matey’

to apologize for his lack

become

to Leavis or to

so:

and Ronald Bottrall of

in those days.

‘Chirpy’ was

of animation when he was terminally

ill.

a

Leavis word;

I

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

10

who was

Pembroke,

for help with publishing

manuel took

about

to appeal to Leavis for advice

One, and

a First in Part

Both took only one

poetry and

same year Denys Harding

In the

it.

his

Em-

at

so did Lionel Knights of Selwyn.

part of the English Tripos,

Harding changing

to

Moral Science (philosophy) and Knights, like Leavis, taking one part of History. He was not supervised by Leavis, but Stanley Bennett put him in touch for advice about the prize essay on which he was working on the future of literary criticism. At his parents’ house, just up Leys Road, Knights often saw Leavis leaving ‘The Criticastery’ with

also supervised for St John’s, helping

Between 1928 and 1930 Leavis Stanley Bennett,

whom

his rucksack.

the college used as a Director ot Studies.

47

The student careers of Harding and Knights illustrate a basic feature of early Cambridge English: it was English-and-another-subject. Harding’s Moral Sciences

transfer to closest issue

He

of Leavis’s collaborators.

of

Scrutiny,

became one of

interesting because he

is

contributed the

first

essay to the

‘A Note on Nostalgia’, importantly placed in

a

the first

journal

sometimes accused of unthinking commitment to an old order. The Moral Science Tripos was not popular: when Harding was awarded his

were only eleven candidates. He took this tripos not for the philosophy, but because it was the only way in which he could study psychology at Cambridge, which interested Hard-

Two

First in Part

in 1928, there

ing after reading Richards

— and being one

guinea-pigs. In English, gambolling criticism,

he

know how

trapped

felt

‘in

among

the subjectivities of literary

of porridge’.

a large plate

He wanted

personal response to poetry could be articulated with

was

objective reliability and at that date there

be had. Richards had said Criticism

ot the Practical Criticism

on

a little

and had lectured on the

little

‘value’ in

subject.

But

specific

The

to

some

guidance to

Principles of Literary

his ideas

about

literary

judgement were not made public until two years later in Practical Criticism (1929). William Empson was to write brilliantly on the issue of response and discipline (pages on which Leavis seized), but this was not to

be published until

Ambiguity.

When

psychology,

1930,

in

the

Harding changed

Empson was

still

last

to

chapter of Seven

philosophy

in

Types of

order to learn

studying mathematics. His change of

subject also illuminates the informality of the

Cambridge system,

the

model on which Leavis himself operated. Harding vaguely mentioned his doubts about studying English to a graduate student at Emmanuel, R.

him

W. in

Pickford

(later

touch with

F.

Professor of Psychology at Glasgow),

C. Bartlett,

who

put

later Sir Frederic Bartlett, Professor

of

POET-AS-LEADER, MINORITY CULTURE 93 I

In

1

Psychology and author of the classic, Remembering. He admitted Harding into Moral Science, but left the teaching of him to Pickford. In this world the influence of the graduate student was potent. 48 Coincidentally, the experience of the war was beginning at last to be assimilated into English consciousness. In 1929 two books were published about the war which helped many veterans to adjust to their

memories

through fresh recollection: Richard Aldington’s Death of a Hero and Robert Graves s Goodbye to All That. Leavis read Graves ‘with great

delight’.

mess

He

did ‘magnificently what Aldington

though Leavis conceded were good. 49 of’,

At the end of the decade

made

that the ‘transcripts

Leavis’s

mother

died.

It

such a sickening

of war experience’

was the moment he

could consider the possibility of a career elsewhere, with his young wife, and indeed look forward to what might become of her career. At this

moment, whatever

his

Q.D.L. showed great professional promise. There seemed no question of leaving Cambridge. position,

Poet-as-Leader, Minority Culture 1931 After his marriage Leavis began to write in earnest on contemporary verse and prose, and

on modern

He began

culture.

to link his fields

of

study, joining the literary sociology of his doctoral dissertation to his literary criticism of new writing. In these months he wrote a long essay

on modern poetry and two pamphlets. The Cambridge Review in spite of his reproof of F.L. Lucas, continued to pnnt his reviews, including ,

his

excited

1931

welcome

lor

Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity

in

January

.

Leavis began his essay on to Gerald Heard’s journal

modern poetry of

nately, the

in late 1929, as a contribution

humanism’, the Realist. UnfortuJanuary 1930. ‘English Poetry and the

scientific

magazine collapsed in Modern World. A Study of the Current Situation’ was eventually published in French in October 1930, with the help of Leavis’s pupil Henri Fluchere. The essay developed an idea from Richards’s The Principles of Literary Criticism: that the poet

is

growth of the mind shows

Leavis puts

itself’

or,

as

‘the point at it,

conscious point of the race in his time’.*

* See Chapter Five,

To Downing

College’, ‘Incipient Corruption? 1937’.

which the ‘the

most

I

EXCITING STRANGENESS I925-I93I

12

The

experience in any age are realized by only

human

of

potentialities

minority, and the important poet has also, of course, the

is

important because he belongs to

a tiny

this

(and tor

his capacity

power of communication). Indeed,

not merely experiencing and his power of communicating are indistinguishable; because his because we should not know of the one without the other, but his power of making words express what he feels is indistinguishable from not tully awareness of what he feels. Almost all of us live by routine, and are

we

aware of what

feel;

we do not express to of experience. Our reactions to the

seems paradoxical,

or, if that

ourselves an account of our possibilities

tend not to be personal, to be merely those which the needs of the society has taught us to regard as appropriate: we live for moment. The poet is unusually sensitive, unusually aware, more sincere and

shocks and demands of

life

more himself than the ordinary man can be. He knows what he feels and knows what he is interested in. He is a poet because his interest in his experience is not from

separable

his interest in

the evocative use of

making

these

words

Other

literary

is,

we wish

If

human

to

experience,

know what it

is

by

ot his habit ot seeking

to sharpen his awareness of his

communicable.

texture of the most subtle

words; because, that

ways

of feeling, so

in

our age, the

is,

to poetry that

forms can only operate externally, can only

we must

go.

talk to us vaguely:

loses touch poetry moves into the focus of real experiences. If, therefore, poetry of with what the most aware and alert minds of the age feel about the subject

and about the value of life, then the age will be lacking must be it civilization in finer awareness. That this is a really grave danger (as it and material well-being) it is perhaps is something more than comfort, hygiene ot the impossible to bring home to any one who is not already convinced

man and

his condition,

importance of poetry. So that

it

is

indeed deplorable that poetry should so

widely have ceased to interest the intelligent

50 .

Leavis had dealt with the ‘minority’ before, the potentialities

of

human

happy few

in

whom

‘the

experience are realized’. His doctoral dissertation

by the market-place, and so the broadening and flattening of his public. Market was set against minority. Now Leavis defined the leader of the minority as the poet. Richards had said

showed

that

the writer threatened

the

poet could create or enact

new

attitudes,

subtle effects

of

harmony, interinanimation and equilibrium’. But was poets needed the right reader to understand these effects. Leavis saying that it was for the poet to educate the minority of ‘right readers’. ‘contrast,

Leavis

minority

conflict,

was beginning taste,

work. Where

Cambridge

to

define

the

audience tor poetry, ever

a

but he also had to think about an audience for his own and how was he to publish? In this he had a piece of

luck.

Leavis was swept up into a student enterprise that

POET-AS-LEADER, MINORITY CULTURE 1 I 93

became

a

real-world enterprise,

a

H3

process characteristic of the

Cambridge

where amateur theatre ran into professional theatre and the student newspaper into national journalism. Leavis had a pupil arts scene,

at

John’s,

Gordon

Fraser,

who

started a small publishing outfit for him. ‘At

the age of nineteen,’ he said, friendship that

Gordon

was

St

‘I

was

Leavis’s student

and

his publisher: a

to last fifty years.’

came from a lower-middle-class clergy family Highlands. He went south when his mother was widowed

Fraser’s father

in the Scottish

to seek his fortune.

He

did so with fairy-tale success.

Articled to a

Midlands accountancy firm, he was sent on audit to an ailing coppertubing company in Leeds. He stayed up late with the books and persuaded the Managing Director that the business could be turned

around, for which he was offered

a post

and asked to name

he shrewdly requested an allocation of the then near-worthless shares, resigned from his articles and set about reform, becoming in due course director of a prosperous business. He sent his son Gordon to Oundle, briefly to Leeds University, and then up to Cambridge, where he fell under the spell of Leavis. In his final year Fraser founded a publishing business for Leavisian studies, called

- what

else?

-

his salary:

the Minority Press. St

John’s College was not pleased to be the editorial address. 51 Leavis was able to work on the implications of a poetry-led a

pamphlet published by

Fraser’s

Minority

Minority Culture (1930) he explained that

Press. In it

Mass

culture in

Civilization and

was upon the minority

that

depended our power of profiting by the finest human experience of the past; they keep alive the subtlest and most perishable parts of tradition.

finally

Upon them depend the implicit standards that order the finer living of an age, the sense that this is worth more than that, this rather than that is the direction in which to go, that the centre

is

here rather than there.

was staking out for himself a project of preservation he himself working on poetry and Q.D.L. on fiction in the research for her Ph.D. dissertation in which Leavis s account of the history of journalism was Leavis

,

married to Richards’s theory of culture

as

needing (and losing)

its

‘right

Culture high and low was under survey and analysis in the Leavis household. F.R.L. observed how reputations were made among readers

.

Q.D.L. spent every day in the university library hoovering through volumes of popular fiction. Leavis had Fraser to help him, poets,

Q.D.L. had another of

his St

John

s

pupils reading

up and copying out

1

EXCITING STRANGENESS

14

I9 2 5 _I 93

I

culture’. passages of data illustrating ‘the state of contemporary

Denys

Thompson had taken one year of classics, and was then taught by Leavis clergyman’s son from for Parts One and Two of the English Tripos. A among Darlington, he counted the cheerful visits to The Criticastery An Economic the most happy of his life. He started a Ph.D. dissertation, could History of English Literature from Scott to the Present Day’, but 52 Thompson went on to not afford to continue and gave it up in 193 3 Leavis, and teach at Gresham’s School in Norfolk, which fed pupils to

in Schools),

he founded the journal The Use of English (originally English

which propagated the Leavisian movement in schools. Minority Culture. In 1930 Gordon Fraser issued Mass Civilization and By Christmas a further five ‘Minority Pamphlets’ had been issued: one by Leavis himself and one by John Middleton Murry, both on D.H. Lawrence, one by R.P. Blackmur on censorship,

and

a

pamphlet about Powys by another

a story

by T.F. Powys pupil,

St John’s

William

Hunter. Fraser was also publishing Henry Fielding’s Shamela. edited by Brian Downs of Christ’s, one of the original 1926

was

It

of

set

as English Faculty Lecturers, the dapper one whom Leavis always liked the project gentlemanly. He ‘a gentleman’. Fraser’s father did not think

considered Shamela indecent and came a

to

W. Downs

minor. Brian

gross,

serious

Mrs

But

very gross.

effectively.’

the intention of having

Cambridge with its

was Leavis

It

though

had written

satiric criticism

copies destroyed.

in his introduction:

does what nothing

trankness

who

all

persuaded

my

father of the

‘It

else

was

undeniably

is

could

book

I

s

do

so

value as a

of Richardson.

bad Fraser had a different worry. She told Leavis that ‘you had one

influence

longer Fraser

my

on

also

You

did not wear a

tie.

Fraser also undertook

John Dryden, Leavis and sponsoring promising American academics. In view of

works,

critical

were

son.

like

Mark Van Doren

s

not surprising to find Leavis contributing a pamphlet on D.H. Lawrence to the series; but at the time this was an in excursion into a field to which he did not expect to return. Even enhanced after the publication of Lawrence’s letters (which greatly

his

later

history,

it

is

1933,

his valuation

Lawrence his

of the writer), he wrote about

that

‘I

shall

never again,

works the prolonged and

I

his

Minority Pamphlet on

intensive frequentation that

preparing of that essay, whatever

its

body of went to the

suppose, be able to give the

crudities.’

53

POET AS-LEADER, MINORITY CULTURE I93I D.H. Lawrence had died on every spare

moment

March

2

1930. In

I I