Christopher Ricks

Christopher Ricks interviewed by Alan Macfarlane 25th July 2013
0:05:07 Born in Beckenham, Kent, in September 18th 1933, a day of birth I share with Dr Johnson, Greta Garbo and Batman; I know nothing about my great-grandparents; both of my grandfathers were dead before I was born; my maternal grandfather was in the fur trade and was French, with behind that, Polish, so my mother's maiden name was Gabrielle Valentine Ernestine Leontine Roszak, Roszakbeing the Polish bit; two of those names were in expectation of a bequest, perhaps, or a gift from uncles Ernest and Leon, neither of whom came up with anything, so she dropped those names and became Gabrielle Valentine Roszak and then Ricks; my children amiably thought of it as Vaseline, thinking of names that they could have for my mother who was a very loveable person; I think the fur trade was in France and then came to England; I know almost nothing; the divorce of my parents happened when I was about three; I remember nothing from before the war, but the family rifts meant that there wasn't much talk about families further back; my father's father was also in the rag trade - in women's coats and suits, wholesale, in London - so it may well be that my mother met my father in that sort of professional world; I can't remember my father and mother together; both of them remarried; I can hardly go behind that except for a painter whose name is Ricks who exhibited sometimes at the Royal Academy though he was not an Academician; I would like to have seven of his paintings to leave to my seven children; I have four painting of his, one of himself looking more amiable than he was likely to have been, and wearing a skull cap, misinterpreted by colleagues of mine in America establishing him as Jewish; I like his paintings and the go for quite a lot of money; he lived in Somerset; Ralph his son, Walter Ricks, my grandfather, married my grandmother who was from Scotland, who was a Bruce; so all the boys had the middle name Bruce; my father was James Bruce Ricks, my uncles Rafe and Donald Bruce Ricks, and I kept that going with my sons by my first marriage; they are David and William Bruce Ricks
4:27:11 The family, despite the rag trade connotation, was not Jewish; there was more than a vein of anti-Semitism on my father's side and there would be real disagreements about how heinous that was - I think it was deplorable; it was sort of impersonal and went with a perfectly honest expression that some of one's best friends were Jews, but it was odious rather than heinous; but there is a point of view which says that anti-Semitism is gangrenous which means that unless is it extirpated you will die of it; I remember that the pubs in London even after the war - the Cock Tavern near where Dad worked off Oxford Street, still had anti-Semitic cartoons on the walls but it also had anti-Welsh, anti-Scottish and anti-Irish ones; I never liked any of that but probably toyed with it at my grammar school
5:41:18 My father went into his father's business; my grandfather died in his forties; almost the only bit of family memorabilia that I have is an obituary from The Drapers’ Record, and he was clearly respected in the trade; my father didn't like work and had cocooned himself against various unhappinesses that had befallen him; his father died before he had ever really got to know him; back then you didn't really know your father as a child but got to know him later on; one of his brothers, Donald, after whom my brother was named in due course, was killed on a motor bike when young; my father himself got tuberculosis in about his late teens, and then he married my mother, so this was a string of unhappinesses; he clearly went off my mother rather quickly, and her being French was not an advantage; I thought she was very good looking and I remember rather lovely photos of her when young; Dad didn't like working, would go to work and open a tin of chocolate biscuits and eat them doing the Times crossword puzzle, would go out for a long non-working lunch and so on; the firm had been started by Callander, Davies and Ricks (my grandfather), and they came up with the cumbrous compacted name Caldaric, clearly a bad move; Callander was successful, and his son was powerful, perhaps not always entirely scrupulous; Davis disappeared at some point from it, so it was Callander's son and Rick's son who ran it; Callander worked and therefore controlled much more; they made coats which were unfortunately made to last forever, but it was a time when women were thinking they did not want coats that would last forever, so the very thing that had been their strong selling point when fashion was not very powerful did for them; Dad presided over the gradual dissolution of what had been a successful business which I think left quite a lot of money; I used to hear a figure like £40,000 a long time ago which was then in South American railways, which must have seemed a good buy at the time; my grandmother lived into her nineties, was Scottish an wore a kilt, had great dignity and outlived all her three sons which was a tragedy for her; Donald had died in his teens; Ralph had won a Military Cross and escaped from a prisoner of war camp during the war but had run to seed after and died youngish; my father was in the firm; from very early on my brother Donald and I had been allocated formally but not custodially to a parent; I was clearly my mother's child and Donald, my father's; Donald and I got on perfectly well and went to the same boarding school; it was thought that Donald would become a businessman and there was a business into which he could go; it was thought I was some sort of precocious, brainy little boy, though there wasn't any talk of an academic life, nobody had been to a university; my mother looked after my interests by giving me a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement when I was a schoolboy and my father looked after my brother by teaching him to handle chisels; Donald loved doing things about the house; so my father's world was a business world to which he did not dedicate himself; my brother in due course joined the firm hoping to protect it against our father; fortunately it folded after a few more years; it was not protectable, so Donald escaped; he would not have been able honourably to leave it, but fortunately it went bankrupt; he then moved into the Burton group and had a perfectly successful business career still in the world of women's coats and suits; he retired just before sixty; from when he was thirty he counted down exactly how long he had to go and just before sixty his patience snapped, and he left England and went to Scotland with his wife, and fished, enormously; my mother did every kind of job to earn a little bit of money; she must have had alimony but it probably wasn't much; my Scottish grandmother was quite generous to her; my French grandmother who lived with her son, my uncle Jean, until Jean died; Jean was forbidden to marry and there was no way of relinquishing his duties to my grandmother; I think my mother had come to England as a child of eight or twelve; she didn't sound French except for the affectation using a French form for the Odeon and Gaumont cinemas; there was no money on either side but there was a shabby gentility on my father's side; he had been to Framlingham, a minor public school; I was at a grammar school from eight to eighteen
12:58:08 I do work too much; I don't know what relation that has to my being an irritable person, and I am not exactly impatient, but I am not good at relaxing and don't like holidays; I love going to other places if I have some reason other than enjoying myself to be there; speaking at the Chinese university in Beijing, I liked going there because I gave three talks and was there for four days, so it was worth it; I think I have been determined not to be my father in so far as one determines these things; there is a wonderful moment when William Empson said about King Lear "at this moment Lear decides not to go mad"; I think it is quite wonderful as it is something that happens in the play - you can't go on deciding not to go mad, but its like deciding to get out of a nightmare; so I think my father's very amiable fecklessness - he lived for games, he was happy playing mahjong, bridge would have required too much of him, but chess, draughts, shove-halfpenny, billiards, snooker, golf and a crossword puzzle, that was it; I'm not good at any of those ways of relaxing, if that's what they are; my mother had great sweetness of disposition; I wish I had as sweet a disposition as she had; she was never unkind; my step-mother was often unkind; my father left my mother for my stepmother; I wasn't told that but if you look at the timing of it that is clearly what it was; I was about three and my brother, Donald, four years older; I remember nothing back then but I remember being told things; for instance, when Donald was born; my mother came round from whatever the equivalent of pethidine was back then, and asked whether he was all right; the midwife said that he "doesn't have all his fingers on one hand"; my mother gulped, and the midwife said "but he would look very funny with all his fingers on one hand"; you are no longer allowed to be a midwife and make remarks of that kind, but it was rather wonderful; when I heard it about six or eight I thought how wonderful the English language is; my step-mother's name was Grace Skelton; she was called Gay; she was brisk and curt and had a hard life because Dad never did anything about the house at all; it was partly that people back then didn't do anything; she cleaned his shoes, made his lunch, saw him off to work; she didn't work; my mother had odd jobs, for instance, she worked on a farm in Berkshire for a while, in the war she worked in a munitions factory and one night made more sprockets than anybody else; they both smoked much too much; my stepmother was very severe and I was frightened of her; from eight to eighteen I was at a boarding school; before the war I remember nothing other than black out; I remember bombs falling in Beckenham in, I suppose, 1940; was evacuated down to Cornwall and still have the bible that was given to me by the family with whom my brother and I lived; in early 1942 when I was eight and a half I went to King Alfred's School, Wantage, and stayed until I was eighteen; my brother joined a bit later and protected me from being beaten into a pulp; it was important not to be too protective of a younger brother because that would mean they were definitely beaten up, but it certainly helped me that he was in the same school; a possible explanation of my step-mother's severity was the difficulty of living witwho basically lived in the pub where he was much loved and had the ability to get on with everybody, a skill you have if you are a certain kind of gentleman - he would read and write letters for people who couldn't do do for themselves

19:38:19 King Alfred's School, Wantage had about fifty boarders and about a hundred to a hundred and fifty day boys, or day bugs as we affectionately called them; it was that or Newbury; we were looking for somewhere that wasn't going to be bombed and was not very expensive; it was a direct grant school, so my Scottish grandmother put up a little bit of money, I think, but I must have had a scholarship there, and I got a good education; I was very frightened and of course prefects beat boys back then, and masters beat boys; everybody got beaten sometime; it doesn't seem to have done me any great harm thought I am not in favour of it; I can't think of any interesting traumatization; we didn't have hazing; I went into the house that wasn't part of the main school; there was still gas light, there was a matron, it was rather Dickensian or perhaps like the Joan Aiken books The Wolves of Willoughby Chase, not nineteenth century but twentieth century Victorianizing; there was a White Russian who lived across the road and things like that kind; Wantage was fine; you weren't allowed into town except on a Saturday morning; you weren't allowed to have much pocket money which was perhaps a good idea; you wore a school uniform; I think we were well taught; the two English masters were very good, Mr Swan and Mr Harrison; Mr Swan had been educated at Cambridge and believed in Dr Leavis, so at fourteen or fifteen he wanted us to read Eliot, Joyce and Lawrence, as well as other things; Mr Harrison was old-fashioned and believed that Milton was a very great poet; I think they liked one another and they certainly showed it was possible amiably to argue or to differ; I was asked to write something for the Sunday Times some ten years ago and I wrote about Mr Swan and Mr Harrison, and word came from Australia where Mr Harrison was living out his retirement; so the teaching was fine; I protected myself, as at the beginning of Jane Eyre, by being bookish, and as at the beginning of Jane Eyre it doesn't really protect you because they throw the book at you and hit your head, but it was something, and with minor snobberies - I had a golf club and a few golf balls and would go out onto the playing field and hit these golf balls about, and it distinguished me from ploughboys, that's my feeling about it
23:22:23 I didn't know that I needed glasses until I was about twenty-seven; Donald wore glasses from early on but I didn't wear them, and my oldest child, David, who is now fifty-four, realized when he was young that he needed glasses and he would set off for Bristol Grammar School, put the glasses in his pocket and see out the day at school, but he clearly had weak sight; I was afraid of the cricket ball which seemed immensely too hard, I didn't like the football either, I didn't like games though I played hockey; nobody likes being left wing, so I was able to be left wing, a position from which I was ousted by the only person from school that I have kept in touch with, a man called John Barnard, a very good scholar of Augustan literature and an editor of Keats, and a very nice person; I did fencing because I didn't want to be punched in the face with a boxing glove; I didn't have hobbies or collect things though I might have had a stamp album in which I quickly ceased to want to put stamps; I read a lot; I was terrible at drawing and was bottom of the class; I wasn't good at any kind of art or woodwork; Donald was blithely being the opposite, of course; I don't think I had any hobbies, just reading; my mother wanted me to learn the piano; I did not want to and never practised, and it was the period of my life when I had most persistently to make up scarcely credible lies about why I hadn't been able to practise; I was terrified of my blind piano teacher who could tell whether I was lying from my voice; I begged my mother not to waste her money on these lessons but it was very important to her, perhaps vicariously, if you want to live out, as parents tend to, what one hadn't done oneself; so the 'Song of the Volga Boatmen' I could just about muster; I liked singing, I wasn't good at it but liked it a lot, and of course 'Messiah' was a pleasure to sing; listening to music is important to me; I thought I would sing in a choir when I got to Oxford, and I did at first, probably the Balliol choir though I don't remember quite just what it was; I found myself short of time as I needed to get on with work; my father loved classical music; he had a small but rather good collection of records; he had a huge old gramophone with a great golden horn; we were not to touch it; it was a huge horn on a great square cabinet with a sort of cigar clip to clip the fibre needles; we were never to touch it; you could see him moving into dismay and despair at everything when he ceased listening to classical music because he had loved listening to it; he liked minor composers best; it was clear to him that Peter Warlock was underrated in the mash of those foreign people; we weren't allowed to put it on and once he didn't put it on it wasn't there any longer; radio was important; listening in the darkened dormitory if you were allowed to, to Valentine Dyle reading some dark story, that was all good; we weren't allowed into the cinema of course; had lots of homework, that was all right; was taught by J.M. Cohen, the Editor of Penguin Classics, one of the great honourable popularizers, translator of Montaigne, Rabalais, many great Penguin enterprises; he was as he said on one of the jackets "jerked into school mastering by the Blitz", so he lived out his time at Wantage and after the war went back into the publishing world; he left a report on my brother - he had to leave a report when he left the school on each of the forms, and of the fifth form the entire report consisted of the words "only Ricks is hopeless"; I loved regaling Donald with that to the end of his days; I liked Cohen though I don't remember him very well, he was a force for good
29:52:05 I do listen to classical music, especially to Haydn; I remember my astonishment when about thirty years ago I was talking about favourite composers and somebody I didn't know said Haydn was the greatest composer; I docketed it; Haydn makes me happier than any other, I don't mean he is deeper but I love it; I do listen a lot; I am not really a writer, only a literary critic, sometimes a literary historian and editor; I have no creative abilities at all; I would not deny that there is something creative and imaginative about the immense sum of things, that is the imaginative editorial decisions, to see that this needs to be amended in the Housman manner, that is creative; I think there is a huge difference between what Paradise Lost is and what any book about Paradise Lost is; in philosophy that is not the case; any philosophy is philosophy; if I turn towards Bernard Williams he is doing the same thing as Aristotle or whoever the philosopher should be; there is a simple continuum there, they are all philosophers, whereas for me, what happened in literary criticism was that the word “discourse” arrived; we are all engaged in a discourse and I think that was very bad for literary criticism, that what I do is a second-order activity, it is a service industry though a service well worth rendering; I think I do render a service to Keats but we are not engaged in “discourse”
32:55:12 I was confirmed at the ordinary age and I pretended that I sufficiently believed, but that was the end of it; at confirmation a little voice said, "come off it", and I realized that I didn't believe any of it; Dad had the irrationality of an angry atheist - in Beckett it would be "The bastard, he doesn't exist"; Dad had a Hardyesque view that if there was a god he had killed Dad's father, killed Dad's brother, he had given Dad tuberculosis and he'd sent my mother Dad's way, so Dad seethed against the Christian god but basically wasn't interested other than to expostulate; my mother in a characteristically amiable way would have liked to think there was something in it; she must have been brought up as a Catholic because it didn't seem to be a Huguenot family; she never went to church; I of course went to chapel and church in Wantage all the time; Wantage was a very religious place; it teemed with nuns; the rival to us was a [girls] school called St Mary's where they played lacrosse and we weren't allowed to even look at them; so it felt very priest-ridden and black; I never believed what was said in the sermons; like a lot of people I liked the music, I loved the King James Bible and the Book of Common Prayer, wonderfully well-written, so I didn't mind taking part in all that; there wasn't much question whether one would take part except by a kind of exhibitionist intransigence which I didn't fancy; the Bishops were either too fat or too thin and they all came and gave terrible sermons, telling you that the cross is I crossed out - thank you very much, I have read George Herbert, can you not treat us better that that; I didn't believe any of it; I loved Empson fairly early though probably I didn't read him until I was in the army; I remember being astonished in the barrack room that somebody was reading Seven Types of Ambiguity; a bold thing to do when doing National Service, I thought this guy is really going to get beaten up; Empson's anti-Christian crusade has always felt very true to me, and Shelley's remarks and so on; I love Milton, my favourite reading at school, partly out of snobbery, but it is the greatest sort of science fiction book in the language and is very thrilling; C.S. Lewis's attempts to make sense of a plurality of inhabited worlds did fascinate me; I suppose I was at school when I read Perelandra, Out of the Silent Planet and Screwtape Letters, and thought them very valiant but terrifically unconvincing; they were clearly what the religion was up against; you would have to have a Christ on every planet, and no amount of calling your character Ransom made it altogether plausible; my oldest child is a Christian; that was not a horrid shock but it was a big surprise a few years ago; he is now fifty-four; he and his wife, Katy, are living in the Head's house of Sevenoaks School, she is the Head; they also bought a house in the country and I asked David if the Vicar had called; he said "No, but since the subject has come up I should perhaps let you know that I have been received into the Church of England" - to my astonishment as I had given him a healthy upbringing; I didn't know what to say but immediately shook his hand as the right thing to do; I think that Empson is right that it is a loathsome system of torture worship; whether there is a god or not is different from whether the Christian God is the blackest thing invented by the heart of man, which is Empson's view; alone of the great religions it declined to abolish human sacrifice; if you are a believer you say that alone of the great religions it successfully abolished human sacrifice by having a human sacrifice that was not solely human, and was once and for all; so that is the argument but the doctrine of the Trinity seems to me pernicious in the ways in which Empson believes it to be; I am theologically unschooled and my friends who are Catholics roll their eyes at my ignorance, and I don't doubt reasonably, but you need the Trinity because if God is identical with the son it is masochism, and if He is not identical it is sadism; I think the Holy Ghost is going to condemn the other two to eternal torment; He's been very badly treated and not just for the last few centuries; I have been told that Dante realized the Holy Ghost, but on the whole the religion has been father and son; it has gone binary in practice however triangulated it was meant to be; Milton adduces the Holy Ghost very beautifully but briefly, dove-like sits brooding on the great abyss and makes it pregnant, even that with the odd feeling that it could sit brooding if only now that you were making it pregnant; I am not one of those people who says that I wish I could believe it were true; I will not like the prospect of dying though the prospect of living forever is immensely worse; irrespective of whether it was torment, it would be torment to live forever in heaven as far as anybody can conceive; these are naiveties; I am glad I don't believe because I think it is pernicious, but I don't argue with David about it, for whom the music has swept him into a community of more than feeling
41:23:06 I went to Balliol because Cyril Bailey the editor of Lucretius was the Chairman of the Governors of King Alfred's School; we must have met on some occasion and he and his wife invited me to tea; his wife was a very handsome, generous and good person, who knew as Cyril did that the G in Gemma is hard; Cyril had lovely blue eyes and was able to convey some sort of affinity through his eyes when you were in the company of other people; I knew that he was a great classical scholar; Housman didn't think him great but Housman didn't think many people great; it was a great bit of luck to know Cyril Bailey, and I have always liked old men; he was probably only seventy or eighty; I think he died about ninety; without any ostentation he just had lovely memories; he had been taught amateurishly to skate by Matthew Arnold on a frozen pond, and on the edge of the pond Arnold's wife and daughter saying "do be careful"; later, when Geoffrey Faber's life of Jowett came out, Cyril Bailey said he was glad the book had been written but could not be in a room with Jowett for one minute and not feel the force of his genius, and on no page of Faber's book could you feel the force of genius; I revered him; I had put in for St John's and was offered an exhibition; I knew no protocol; nobody from King Alfred's School had gone to Oxford as far as I could tell, and nobody in my family had been to university; this is still the case often in America; Boston University has a lot of first generation people going to university; Cyril said I should not go to St John's but to Balliol, and told me to apply; I was offered a scholarship at Balliol and then Poole, the Head of St John's wrote me this absolutely withering note which was very intemperate and wrong of him; he should have said that it was the wrong way to do it, but it was a cruelly frigid letter to somebody of seventeen; that was a shock and I found it very disturbing; E.T. (Bill) Williams must have been Senior Tutor at Balliol and after the interview said that I would be given the scholarship and he wanted to know what I would do about National Service; he then proceeded to tell me that I should do it now rather than later, should go into the army, into the infantry to learn to be a soldier, rather than into the Signal Corps or Education Corps; it was actually very good advice so I then did my two years; going back to Oxford worried me for a while as I appeared to have blotted a gigantic copy book; I was in the army from 1951-53; I did basic training in Colinton Barracks just outside Edinburgh - my Scottish blood was kicking in as that was in the Royal Scots; I told myself regularly that Donald, my elder brother, was in this barracks four years ago and he survived, but I had to keep saying it to myself; I was then picked out as officer material, was sent to Eaton Hall to swarm up ropes and show I could cross a crocodile infested pond, and was made a Second Lieutenant; I was there with Jonathan Wordsworth, collateral descendant of the poet, who after a while was invalided out because he had a varicose vein about the size of my little finger nail; at the time I was rather vexed at his having eluded his duty, but in the event it was a mercy for me because he went to Oxford a year before me and was therefore never competing with me for fellowships, and he would have defeated me; the horse-shaped face of the Wordsworth, and the name, and the knowledge that there were lots of family manuscripts still knocking about, and he had great force of character; so it was fortuitous that he was already ensconced at Exeter when I needed a job at Worcester; I was commissioned into the Green Howards, Alexandra, Princess of Wales's Own Yorkshire Regiment; it was a second battallion which was lucky because it was almost entirely National Service people; I had a very good Company Commander called Jock Nayber CHECK, and when I received an honour a few years ago, a letter came from him saying he hoped I remembered him, recommending that I joined the Green Howards Regimental Association, which I did, whereupon they disbanded the Green Howards; in Egypt I was guarding mounds of rotting potatoes with killer dogs; I didn't train the dogs and didn't guard them effectively; we were saying for the millionth time that we would never leave Egypt, or Cyprus either; we clearly soon going to leave both, but it is important that it is prior to the Suez folly; Suez made me know that I would never vote Conservative, which is foolish because Labour is sometime a stench in the nostril and one can hardly bring oneself to vote for it; it wasn't just the folly of it, but the lying, Selwyn Lloyd, collusion with the French, and it was a horrid anti-Arab feeling which I was very aware of in Egypt the whole time; all those claims that they couldn't possibly run the canal; a hatred of Naguib as well as Nasser; a pretence that Farouk was somehow fun; I disliked all of that; it was pointless being there, but it wasn't ugly or disagreeable; I saw one dead person, somebody who had electrocuted themselves while ironing; I was lucky because others whom I had done officer training with did go to Malaya and Korea, so I was lucky with my Regiment
51:33:21 At Balliol I liked very much my Tutor, John Bryson; he was a very old fashioned belle-lettrist; he discovered the portrait of Donne with the great flaming red lips; he did it with the help of an art historian but he did it without asking the usual questions; he had the touch of a G.K. Chesterton; Edmund Gosse who was a pathological liar had said in his life of Donne that there was a portrait of Donne in a particular place; everybody had written to this great house and they had always written back saying they had nothing; Bryson wrote and asked for a list of all the portraits that they had; they did so and one was a portrait of Duns Scotus, but it was a portrait of Donne; that didn't happen while I was an undergraduate; in a way it was gathering in some huge gestation within John Bryson; he was very endearing; he smoked non-stop, stubbing the cigarette out after a couple of puffs - a sign of a febrile intelligence; Bryson was almost always late so the key thing was either twenty or twenty-five past the hour you had to decide whether he was going to come; he wouldn't be there probably before twenty past but I was brought up to be there irrespective, and it was a rare occasion when JNB was on time; I liked very much the system of reading the essay aloud, I think it was good for one's prose; it is difficult to write sentences like "the tactile mesh of the TV mosaic has begun to permeate the whole sensorium" if you have actually got to utter it; Bryson didn't want to listen to the whole thing but he had built in some ability to know when one was getting near the end; you could try to defeat him by varying the length, but he would always say that "it took a little time to get going but the point you made at the end..", and so on; he would sit at his desk and you would hear him opening his letters with a paper knife and reading them while one was reading an essay; at the end he would then say some very penetrating thing; I was very fond of him; he was totally without pretension; he said the point of studying English was that you would have for the rest of your life a body of great things in your mind and they will be a lifetime's resource for you; there wasn't anything about it helping you to be a good teacher or anything like that; it wasn't at all Leavisite, so it was a good thing that J.C. Maxwell had been the Andrew Bradley Research Fellow and had given Leavis's books to the College library; I was lucky in that my cast of mind wasn't at all like my Tutor's; I was going to be reading Empson and Leavis irrespective, and it was very good that there was somebody who simply said "How many other masques have your read?", and that was the right question; Alistair Campbell was the Tutor in Old English; he was very eccentric; he rather knew that he was eccentric so that it was somewhat stylized and therefore less effective, but he was a real scholar; we loved the stories about him which were probably true, that he played golf with two balls and claimed that it was the same as playing eighteen holes; that every year in the summer he went to Frisia and won a huge prize for a novel written in the language, a prize for which nobody else ever entered; Derek Brewer the Master of Emanuel, regularly supplemented his income by winning these religious prizes that nobody else ever put in for; Bryson had wanted to admit only me, not because I was transcendently good but because the fewer pupils that he had the better; the College said it was not fair to admit one person in any one year, so he took one other person who became the biographer of Noel Coward; until the end of the three years Alistair Campbell never knew which was which; there was this wonderful tutorial system where week after week you study with someone; at the end of three years Campbell would hand back Day's essays to me, and I would have to tell him that I was Ricks, and he was Day; Bryson had a lovely Hilliard miniature, and Leslie Hotson, about whom Freddy Bateson had written something about his detective work on the sonnets; Bryson had the miniature, Hotson entered the room, saw it and said "That's Mr W.H.", and then wrote a book about it; somebody asked Bryson how Hotson knew it was Mr W.H. and Bryson replied "I didn't think it proper to ask"; it's the homosexual world over centuries; I miss that sort of thing in America; nobody ever says something like that
Second Part
0:05:07 I didn't go to a lot of lectures but never missed tutorials in the College; I spent a lot of time reading and re-reading sitting in my room, not reading secondary but always primary things; C.S. Lewis didn't seem to me to be a great lecturer though he was wonderfully well-informed and he cared about what he was saying; I have been at lectures which I thought were extraordinary accomplishments - Quentin Skinner's lectures are just such accomplishments - Lewis didn't seem to me to be like that; he left Oxford for Cambridge though he kept a house in Headington; after my Milton book came out I was going to meet him; there was some kind of tentative suggestion that I should come to tea - it is funny that I don't have any clearer record or piece of paper - and he died; I admired reading him but I think him a much better literary critic than anything else; I don't think him a good poet or a really good novelist, and I don't really think him a good polemicist, the old stories of his having given up certain kinds of argument about miracles when Miss Anscombe wiped the floor with him; I think in a Chestertonian way, some of his best jokes are Chestertonian or even Chesterton - the phrase "Giant the Jack Killer", for instance; I am always interested in people who have a name that can't be deduced from their initials, and there is something about Clive Staples Lewis being Jack which was a bit disconcerting to me; of the Inklings, Tolkein was the most boring lecturer; he didn't take any trouble at all, and rattled away with an edited copy of Gawain and the Green Knight in his hand; I was perhaps a graduate student when Auden was praising Tolkein for his creative achievements; Helen Gardner was a very good lecturer but it wasn't remarkable force of personality at a podium then, I don't think Oxford English was remarkable for that; the only non-faculty person whose name was ever bruted or mooted was Wind, and we were all supposed to go and we would understand iconography and all the visual arts if we went; but I didn't do that; I tended simply to be reading and re-reading and that was fine; I hadn't heard of Isaiah Berlin, but have loved the Berlin stories I have heard since; his remark about George Steiner "Very interesting phenomenon, very common on the Continent, very rare in England, genuine charleton"; a wonderful remark which is in a way anti-British because we don't even produce genuine charletons; another remark when he was leaving one of George Steiner's lectures he was heard by a friend to remark "I enjoyed that, perhaps not quite in the way intended"; that's the world of Geoffrey Madan's Notebooks; I knew Berlin very slightly because later on I knew Jim Griffin and his wife, Katherine Griffin, where there was a family connection with Isaiah Berlin; I quoted the Joseph remark earlier "Oh good there will be more room in the car"; Joseph: "Not more room, surely, simply less of it occupied"; Berlin would say "Quite unjust", and then you'd know that there was going to be an even more damaging story; another Joseph story - A young man comes, taps on the door, welcomed by Joseph who has an appointment with him. Joseph says, "Would you like to take tea?" The young man says "That's very good of you Professor Joseph. I have just come from London, that would be wonderful". Rings for the College servant. The servant appears and Joseph says "There will be tea after all"; there is the crystallizing of a whole civilization in there. Isn't it wonderful that you can do that much with the words "after all"; young people should not be treated like that, one’s juniors should not be treated like that; from the junior to the senior it would be forgiveable; I didn't know about Austin either; the real loss is that nobody said to me that there was a philosopher called J.L. Austin, that I cared about Empson I should have gone to hear him; one of the few essays I have written about a philosopher is an essay on Austin; I think him a wonderful writer, perverse about literature and the arts and needing to be corrected, but simply wonderful
6:27:17 As an undergraduate I was dedicated to reading things that were on the syllabus; the syllabus course ended in 1830 or 1832; I did the extra paper which took you into the Victorians; if you did badly in this paper it didn't count, but did if you did well, but it required extra work; of course, there was no study of any living writer; in the event I was pleased to do that; you are back in a time when Victorian studies were condescended to; John Bryson edited Matthew Arnold but you have no standing but as a Renaissance or Augustan scholar; clearly the professorships had to go to people who had worked, either like Helen Gardiner, on the Renaissance, or be editors of Pope and so on; that was serious scholarship; David Nicol Smith supervised me briefly for a while as a B.Litt. student, also by Herbert Davis who was a very fine Swift scholar; once to David Nicol Smith I mentioned P.M.L.A. and he said I shouldn't bother too much with those magazines; it was a different era and you did it by consulting your own wonderful library; it was anti the professionalism; in a funny way, it and Leavis agreed; Leavis detested that world of belle-lettres scholarship, but at the same time they were both opposed to the professionalization of literary study; when I started my B.Litt. I didn't know what I was going to do; if my Latin had been good I would wanted to have worked on Gower; I thought, and still think him a wonderful poet; Lewis had written very beautifully about him in The Allegory of Love; I toyed with that in the knowledge that the B.Litt. is a training in sources, authorities and methods, and didn't have to be an original contribution to knowledge; it is, I think, a very good degree as it postpones the decision as to what you actually want to write a book about; that I did on Augustan poetry; I looked at various literary kinds after Pope practised them, so what was the fate of pastorals fifty years following, or epistolary satire; so it had no point other than for me to have a training in sources, authorities and methods; it gained a degree and only that, and I have never published anything from it; then I got the Worcester job; I was very lucky in that my opponent for the job was John Jones, an immensely gifted lawyer turned literary critic, who was at Merton; I was very lucky in that the first words of his first book about why late Wordsworth is underrated - The Egotistical Sublime - the first words were "This is a book of some pretensions in that it seeks to minister to truths which too often lie bedridden in the outhouse of the soul"; now this was a bit of luck because any Fellow of Worcester picking up this book because their reaction would have been "not, I think, for our young men"; it was a quotation from Coleridge but you had to read on a bit to know that; he and I dined the same night, at that rather macabre ceremony at which people in the running for the same fellowship are having dinner at the same time while the College is appraising them; they weren't sure that somebody who was a lawyer and had become a literary type was quite the right thing or who had written those first words; I was lucky with that, and I never, of course, thought I would leave Worcester; one of the happiest days of my life was when I heard; that was in 1958; I had two years at Balliol and after one of those gained the Andrew Bradley Junior Research Fellowship; that was very good; trying to destroy the Master was the sport at the time - David Lindsay Keir; there were wonderful Keir stories; Keir never listened though it was clear something wafted in; he would say "This is very promising Smethurst.." and so on, and actually what he had just heard was that Smethurst's work had been not good at all - (not the Smethurst that you and I know); on one occasion he did listen and the undergraduate was offered a rebuke for doing little more than offering a received opinion; he said, "This will not do" whereupon the undergraduate said, "It ill-becomes you, Master, who in your preface to your Constitutional History of England said that your book makes no pretence other than to offer a.."; that is the Oxford undergraduate at its best, rounding on the Master by quoting his own words back at him
13:20:18 In 1958 Harry Pitt was certainly there; I had talked to my friend Paul Streeten about whom I might like at Worcester as I didn't know anybody in the College; Paul said I would like Harry Pitt very much, and I did; through Harry I met James Campbell and I liked and admired him; not the best-dressed man in Oxford; I enjoyed Worcester; I wearied of giving that many tutorials, I think I did fifteen hours a week; there were various reasons why I left; none of them was pique or petulance or a quarrel; I looked round at dinner one night and every single person dining that evening who had come after me I had voted against; I didn't dislike the people in question but the College was committed to the idea that a good College man, rather narrowly defined, was somebody who would be particularly good with the weaker young men; it is true that we were sort of third choice; the Etonian link was very powerful through Masterman and through my predecessor Colonel C.H. Wilkinson; Etonians who didn't want to go to the House or Trinity would come to us, and they would leave the college not knowing how to spell Othello because they pronounced it Orthello; there were people who would say they could not be here next week "because it is Henley"; it was like being a Victorian governess; but there were not many of those; I lost 3% ever year, I realized, so that after ten years, 30% of them I didn't want to have a conversation about Swift with; I couldn't vary it; with the tutorial system you can't do things that are not in the syllabus; there were lots of characters in the college but I am not sure about Oxford and Cambridge characters; Richard Sayce felling David Mitchell during the tea break of a governing body meeting because Mitchell had referred favourably to something French, Richard Sayce's subject, but Richard took it that he was praising the Maison Française who had evicted Richard from his house; you don't often see people felled; my colleague in English was a man called David Evans who an object of contumely from many of the Fellows; he was a lecturer and there was a lot of patronage of him; I remember at lunchtime somebody turned to him and said "You have a Labour face", and it was very good because it was so true; David Evans, with his Welsh face and glasses... but these funny submerged things; one night combining, there was a lot of praising of themselves for not having appointed Maurice Bowra, not on the good grounds that he was much less important as a classical scholar than you might have thought, but that they were quite right to have appointed Armitage Noel Bryan-Brown who was one of the most boring people on the planet; David Evans made the mistake of saying, "If you mean that he is a prep school master manqué, I agree with you"; after dinner Evans was taken aside by David Mitchell who told him not to speak like that of a colleague in the presence of the servants; it was everything that people dislike of Labour, dislike of Welsh people; David Evans said to Richard Sayce, knowing about the etymology of the name Sayce in relation to sassenach, "When did the Sayce's leave Wales?"; Sayce said, "Has it ever occurred to you that there are advantages in minding your own business"; I have tried to think about what Oxford and Cambridge are like, that is what they are like; that was all part of the hurly-burly of the college; you were supposed to love it; David Mitchell said to me after drinking a lot of sherry, "Do you love this college?"; it had to do with insecurity and all that stuff
20:04:03 The book about Milton is exactly fifty years ago so for my 80th birthday Boston University thinks it might have a Milton occasion; that was based on giving university lectures; I love lecturing; Karl Miller describe me as "culpably" enjoying it; there could be too much showbiz and enjoying oneself, but not at all to enjoy it, you shouldn't do it; I was lecturing on Milton and Jacobean tragedy and things like that; Freddy Bateson was then the most important person to me; he was teaching the B. Litt. and I went to his classes; he did two huge things for me; one was very early on to ask me to be the reviews editor for Essays and Criticism which is the sibling for Past and Present; Freddy had founded it from his own efforts, basically to educate the Oxford English faculty and to encourage those who didn't have a morbid horror of the printing press to print some good things; he offered me that when I was really very young and he asked me not long after to edit Tennyson; he asked me before whom I would like to edit in the Longman's series and I knew that there were lots of Tennyson poems that had either not been collected or published, and I knew it from the writings of Tennyson's grandson; that was a wonderful opportunity and he was a very good and generous person; I wept more at Freddy’s funeral than at any other although he died at a ripe old age, but I was so fond of him; he brought forward a whole slew of people - Roger Lonsdale editing eighteenth century poetry, Alastair Fowler and John Carey both editing Milton; a great thing he did for Oxford English, and he was bitterly condescended to by the Faculty; he was never allowed to examine; I was never allowed to examine; for ten year in the Oxford English Faculty I was on one occasion allowed to examine in the Pass school; the line was that a balanced board meant that every individual member of it was balanced, so Freddy Bateson was denied it on the grounds that he was not; it made for mediocrity in the examining board; my favourite examining story was when John Hale, the historian of Italy, at one point said "And what will you be doing now?" and the woman whom he was interviewing drew her knees back and said "I do think I should be getting back to London" - twelve people in funereal garb, men of immense ugliness, and she thought she was being propositioned; I try to explain to my American students that they are in the position of people who can't ever go bankrupt or ever invest any time or money or energy, because you are judged at every stage, in every subject, in every semester; that is itself based on the aggregate of the five essays you wrote in the semester; its as if you were having your annual salary repaid every day; whereas, the Oxford system allowed you to invest three years, either wisely or foolishly; I thought that was a much better system; I teach in America because I married Judith Aronson thirty-seven years ago; my first wife, Kirsten, had left me for the Regius Professor of Greek - he was professor at Bristol at the time and moved to Cambridge, left his wife and took mine, hence the term husband-in-law; I, not altogether wisely, also put in for a professorship at Cambridge and came here; I went to America after eleven years in Cambridge because Judith, who is eight years younger than I am, had parents who were still alive and mine were not; my work was more portable than hers because she is a graphic designer; she is American; she was the room mate of a student of mine at Worcester whom I taught almost fifty years ago - Steven Isenburg's wife, Barbara; I was in New York at the time when the marriage was falling apart and met her; then a few years after the split Judith and I married; so the going to America was not the almighty dollar; I wasn't happy in Cambridge really because there were terrible rows, but I would never have left Cambridge, had done Jury service, been Chairman of the Faculty Board, I could have simply looked at my fingernails for the next twenty years; I was aware that if I went to America I wouldn't have to retire at sixty-seven, and I wanted to go when I was nearer fifty than sixty and Judith nearer forty than fifty; so I don't regret it though it has been strange to see one's children become Americans - they were three, five and seven when we went there
27:07:22 In America you do not have the tutorial system and do have continuous assessment; the main thing that is really bad about it, though oddly much less corrupting than it ought to be, is simply the teacher being the examiner; American undergraduates are astonished to reflect upon this; it is a price ring and suits both teachers and taught to have nobody else coming in to judge how well you taught; it has led to this huge escalation in grade inflation; it is an immense part of the sexual harassment world; it is not just this person who is teaching, this person is giving you an A or B and can affect the whole of your future; I bring it up whenever there is a discussion in the faculty; people say we see what you mean but have no intention of changing it; the prominent people in any Ph.D. are the people who have worked on it, in America; your first and second readers are your first and second members of your committee; in Cambridge, these are the very people who are precluded from judging it; it is a terrible system; the standard of the students has more to do with the standing of the university; pretty every student at Boston University would rather be somewhere else; now that is not simply a bad thing because at least they do not think they are god's gift to scholarship; Oxford and Cambridge people spend the first year congratulating themselves on having got in; if they got in, why should they be expected to learn, as they have given proof that they don't need to learn anything; it went on at Harvard - 300 years of unremitting self-congratulation take their toll; the B.U. people would rather be somewhere else except that Boston University is a very good second-rank university which is in some respects first rate; I think economics there is now very good, and philosophy was very good when Hintikka presided over it; they would rather be somewhere else except that Boston University has given them a good deal in terms of scholarships; they like the city of Boston and its quite good enough; most of the faculty would rather be somewhere else and that's less good; I think the best members of the faculty are those who have been somewhere else; my first week in Cambridge Massachusetts, Judith and I were having drinks across the road, and some well-dressed lady asked me what I did - "I teach". "Harvard University?" "No, Boston University". "Fascinating..." and she was already moving across the room to talk to somebody else; it is the place that I have most enjoyed teaching, especially seminars and lectures as against tutorials; I think people are weary of giving tutorials; the Cambridge director of study system is radically different from the Oxford system; I taught everything from Chaucer up to the Great War then, so I was a general practitioner in the college and a consultant in the faculty, and I thought that was a wonderful combination, but I think people weary of it
32:09:17 Freddy Bateson mattered to me because he wrote a book called The Scholar-Critic because he thought it essential for people to be literary historians and literary critics and editors; he thought it very bad that these had been apportioned out; so he was an editor of Pope and the Cambridge Bibliography but also the author of a critical biography of Wordsworth, and of a book on English poetry in the English language which was partly linguistic, partly what then was rightly thought to be literary theory; editions last best; nothing lasts forever - the word definitive should never be used; there are things that are authoritative or have the authority; Harford and Simpson Ben Jonson was an authoritative edition; it will never be entirely superseded because the decisions that it took will always have something to be said for them as against subsequent decisions; my edition of Tennyson has been out of print for a long time; I have just been told that Longman has been bought by another publishing house and that the fate of that series of annotated English poets which Freddy Bateson was the general editor of is rather uncertain; I would quite like to get somebody young to update my Tennyson; it would be worthwhile work, though not a huge job; when I originally did it the manuscripts at Trinity were under permanent embargo; Hallam Tennyson gave them to the College in perpetuity that they not be quoted or copied but could be read; now the College should never have accepted the conditions, but it was a wonderful benefaction; Sir Charles Tennyson, the poet's grandchild, and the then Lord Tennyson besought the College to abolish the conditions; it needed a change of librarian - Philip Gaskell came to the College - so my edition was rendered obsolete in the year in which it was published; on every other page it was noted that sources could not be quoted but now this was not the case, but it had to wait for the selling out of that edition and then my doing the work; I would like to think that the edition of T.S. Eliot's poems which is nearing completion - I am doing it with somebody else and there have proved to be contractual problems about that matter; it was not a competition between my co-editor and me but between my co-editor and Faber & Faber; that has been in the last couple of months a matter of sleeplessness for me and it is still not resolved; I think editions last best so I am really pleased to do the Eliot; Eliot is not a greater poet than Tennyson but there is no annotated edition of Eliot at all; he didn't wish there to be such a thing; his widow, for a long time did not wish there to be such a thing; she changed her mind fifteen years ago; at some point Eliot had sent a solicitor's letter threatening to sue me unless I withdrew something, so it was rather wonderful and generous that she invited me to edit Inventions of the March Hare, fifty unpublished early poems; that I am pleased with because it is the kind of thing which has a good chance of never being superseded; we have a better edition of Jane Austen than R.W. Chapman did, but only in certain respects; in literary criticism terms there is a very beautiful remark by Eliot one year on into The Criterion where he sums up what he has been trying to do; he says that it should be the task of a literary journal to exhibit the relations of literature, not to life as something contrasted with literature, but to all the other things which together with literature are the components of life; it is a wonderfully truthful wise formulation; literary criticism is as much a part of life as anything else; the relation of literature to all the other things which together with literature are the components of life; I do very much like my book on Keats and Embarrassment; it is not an interdisciplinary book because I have no disciplinary power or cognisance when it comes to understanding Darwin on the expression of emotion in man and animals; but it uses Darwin, Sartre and so on, a whole lot of people who have cared about blushing, in order to think about something which to me is important, irrespective whether Keats had ever written poems about it; it is characteristic of a great artist to write about things which are important whether they get written about or not; of the books, in a way I am most pleased at that; when gratitude is ever expressed to me as it was in China recently, it was for the Milton book; it is close reading in the interests of something which was then very puzzling to me; I knew and still know that Eliot and Leavis are great critics; Leavis is the greatest of the critics who is not himself a creator; there are an immense number indictments of him which are justified, but its very extraordinary to be not a poet or a novelist and to be that penetrating; to know what's unignorable; the questions he raised must really not be ignored; on the other hand, Milton seemed to be one, so a bit of a problem; Milton is a delight to me to read and these are great critics, so there is something that needs to be sorted out; that meant for me saying that Eliot and Leavis are right about what Milton is like in certain respects; you disagree partly with their description of what is the case and partly with their principles; it is the same with the Keats - if these lines from Keats are terrible, why are they so memorable? - now one answer could be that there is no relation between lines being good and being memorable but there is a little bit of a problem with that; so what's so wrong with being adolescent? If people are right to say it is very adolescent, why do they mean by that it therefore doesn't have anything wise about it, as if Keats's own dismay about his adolescence were not a genuine struggle; I think that one has to start with some sort of puzzle; recently Geoffrey Hill's relation to T.S. Eliot is for me deeply puzzling; Geoffrey's best poems are profoundly indebted to Eliot; they wouldn't have been written without Eliot; they are not pastiche Eliot but they are precipitated by Eliot in a wonderful new efflorescences in the way in which Tennyson if precipitated by Keats, or Wordsworth by Milton; why then does Geoffrey Hill repeatedly speak ill of Eliot as poet, including poems which his poems draw upon? I like to start with something which is really a puzzle; I am not good at middle tissue; if I had to explain to somebody why Donald Davie is a better critic than I am - now he never did any valuable editing so I am not going to yield to him in every respect - but his critical writing is very good at a middle tissue; it's not simply instances of illuminating and analysing, and not a large general proposition or narration; there is a middle thing that he is very good at doing, and I have never been good at doing it; if the essay is one's natural form it doesn't matter so much, but it matters with something claiming to be a whole book; I am very aware of the people who have got that ability to have something that saves it from just being an anthology of instances or a general proposition of general grand theory; Trilling was very good at that; there is a tissue that connects the minute instance imaginatively analysed and the general proposition about the fate of pleasure; its not just here is a proposition that something happened to the fate of pleasure in the romantic period, here are some instances of Wordsworth not being quite sure what he wants to do with pleasure
44:29:13 I now work almost entirely on a computer; it is true that editing is terrifically helped by it; if I need to change a note on Eliot I can just change it, and its not messing about with lots of bits of paper; I think that scissors and paste is still best for an immense number of things; I tend to give talks from notes rather than writing them out; I write straight onto the computer and use it only as a glorified typewriter; the word spreadsheet strikes a chill into my heart; there is no substitute for having for a long time jotted things down; I have been putting together Keynesiana that have to do with Eliot - Keynes reading Eliot on the BBC in 1936; then there is a certain point at which there might be enough of it to form a pattern; almost everything that I do has been incremental; I remember exactly where I was in Beaumont Street in Oxford when I realized Tennyson's use of passages which he had written for quite other poems; now the phenomenon had long been recognised, Sir Charles Tennyson had written about it, but I had done a lot of editorial work and had built up many more instances - this which turns up in Ulysses is written for a different poem, and so on; suddenly I realized that they were all about time; that is not a revolutionary thought, but I thought they are passages that themselves are preserved through time, they have not yet reached their due time; then I realized that it was true not only of Tennyson; then you have got the subject for an essay but you haven't got the subject for a book, though more and more you get books that dilate it, which you think would have been a good article; I have no doubt that what I do is worth doing and I don't actually doubt that I'm good at it; I don't think I have any genius at all; I think it has become an indispensable service; the fate of literature, unfortunately, is now in the universities; in previous times its fate had been in the church or in a political party or in money; the patron of literature is the university; without the university there would be no interest in writing by dead people at all; I really believe that; now its not true that only university people care about past literature its that there is a point at which the past literature is simply not going to be around; what is the crucial patronage without which literature is in terrible trouble; now it is the universities, so that anything bad which happens in universities has an effect which it didn't have when literature had other patrons; it doesn't really have other patrons now; there are a whole lot of other things; there is an Arnoldian side in that Arnold seems to me to be a great writer because he knows that what you should do is to relate it to what is at present the case; since it is not going to be the case in fifty years time its no good saying that the enemy is always one thing; for Eliot, the great enemy is illusions of feeling; he writes about Stendhal and says that Stendhal's scenes are a positive humiliation to read in their understanding of human feeling and human illusions of feeling; that the world of the newspapers and everything else is a world which makes people pretend that they feel things that they don't; maybe it would be good if they feel those things but they are never going to feel them if they don't already feel them; its Beckett, its Swift, its Eliot, and so on; of course, that hasn't always been the case, it is not about cynicism even, its just that knowing what you actually feel - Eliot says intelligence of which an important function is the discernment of exactly what and how much we feel in any given situation; now opposition to Steiner would for me turn largely on the illusion of feeling; I think that the feelings to which he appeals and to which he proclaims are illusory; it might be very good if one had that gigantic concern for this that and the other, but it is not realized, I think, in anything that he has written; half of the talks I hear the congratulations are all the students, the students are all wonderful; no they're not; it was terrible in China because I heard the young Chinese students are behaving exactly like the American ones; everybody who was in the Shakespeare plays was told they were wonderful; there were eighteen prizes given out afterwards and I think there were only eighteen people in it, so everybody got a prize; surely is there not a point at which we have to say you tried very hard at this, but actually it didn't work; 'Timon of London' didn't actually work if you meant it to be a new angle on 'Timon of Athens' because you hadn't thought what it would be to move it from Athens to London; so it has to do with illusions, or a lot of it does
53:57:18 The practice of criticism turns on the relations of philosophy to literature were anciently vexed, it then turns on a different form of which is that whether Terry Eagleton, as it were, is genuinely a philosopher; there are partly ancient questions about what the relationship between the arts and philosophy is which would not be so different as between the arts and theology; that is, it is clear that if things are going well these are complementary and collaborative enterprises, but it is also clear that one is tempted always to claim to be superior to the other; literature and literary studies are always having to acknowledge the danger of a takeover by history to one side or by philosophy to the other; I think history and philosophy to be the most important constituents of a college of liberal arts; history will say this is the case and philosophy will say this is the truth, but basically, literature is in the position of trying to define its responsibilities; it is in some ways continuous with the claims of history and in some ways continuous with the claims of philosophy; while still feeling that these have some claims, there is a certain kind of autonomy, itself a troubled concept; so for me Dr Johnson is the greatest critic because he was the most intelligent anti-philosopher in the English language; he is not just non philosophical he is anti-philosophical; the lexicographer is committed to believing that you quite soon reach the point at which further philosophical cogitation is not going to be valuable; the lexicographer will tell you the difference between an untruth and a lie, but you quite quickly reach the point at which understanding that more deeply is not a philosophical question but historical, political, and so on; the cast of mind is not just kicking the stone and I refute it thus, and so on; Aristotle was a philosopher so one is not going to deny it, but for the Poetics we have less of his art criticism and so on; that ancient contested thing and Leavis versus Wellek was the really important case of it; Wellek was not a philosopher but was a philosophically inclined historian of literature and theorist of literature; what happens then with the arrival of French theory; what characterises a philosophy - it has to be more fully articulated, it has to be more cogently concatenated, it has to claim to cover the whole lot, and it is the opposite cast of mind to that which thinks that principles are again and again like proverbs, that is the difficult thing; there is isn't a philosophical question about he who hesitates is lost versus look before you leap, but understanding the difference between them and why we don't have a proverb which says don't look before you leap or he who hesitates is saved, which is the implication; so it is a different cast of mind and I think it is much truer to how writers have written their work, and much truer to the achievement which is War and Peace, King Lear, and so on; for Leavis it would have to do with scientism, but it isn't actually the physical sciences which turned out to be a kind of enemy from within but resistance to science; we have got to look as though we are not a soft option, we know we are not a soft option but that is not understood; what we will have to have is technical terms, without which the general public is not impressed; Christopher Hill used to say that literature was what historians read in bed, and he's very well read and writes wonderfully about Richardson and Marvell; it is part of an age-old story; the Cambridge quarrel was presented as a quarrel about post-modernist theory; I don't believe that it was; I think it was about the claims of a particular person called Colin MacCabe, and particularly the claim that he should be promoted to a lectureship without entering into open competition with other candidates for such a lectureship
59:24:17 I suppose that when anybody says anything it is either to supply and substantiate an opinion where there wasn't one at all or to amend an existing opinion; that is, you could think that there isn't out there any account of Christina Rossetti that needs to be contested as potent and mischievous; so why is one speaking at all? One would like to think that one has noticed something that other people haven't noticed; being very rudimentary about it, the scholar makes the claim that he or she knows something which you may well not know; the critic supposes that he or she may notice something you hadn't noticed; they are complementary activities but they are very different; the critic needs to acknowledge that there are kinds of fact that he would need to know about a poem; so I suppose that one is saying something in order either to supply or to contest an opinion; I don't see any other reason for saying anything at all; anything is a guess, but..; it is a wonderful formula by Leavis; he himself was prone to have a small yes and a large but; he has warm and authentic praise for Tennyson but he thinks that Tennyson's weaknesses are not only bad for Tennyson but bad for all poetry that supposed that Tennyson didn't have those weaknesses; he makes a great many concessions about Hopkins - Hopkins is strong in these respects, but he did pay a huge price for isolation, and so on; it is all a yes but..; in a variant of that I tell my students, one question - is this true, another is - what truth is there in this, which is a very different question, and we need both; we need not to think that they are the same question; in America getting students to ask the question what truth is there in this, is itself very difficult because they move very quickly to a vote, verdict and sentence; one of my convictions is that art exists to give us pause; there are many other things that art exists to do but being given pause is particularly valuable just now where everybody can spare you a micro-second of attention, where even the President of the United States of America is carved in mid sentence because of what a sound bite is; our sick hurry, our divided aims, everything is against the background of what the prevailing danger and threat is, to resist the age when everything becomes tyrannous; what they want to do is find out what the age is doing and go along with it; if nobody is reading any longer give up reading if everybody is only committed to texting, and so on; I think it is true that there has to be something one believes either needs to be said; there isn't an opinion out there about the poems of James Henry; I edited the poems of James Henry because nobody reads his poems, his poems are disparaged in the entry in the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography because he is thought to be a highly eccentric classical scholar; but I think him a very fine poet; I edited him purely by fluke in that I was struck by the name James Henry and it not being the name Henry James; I took down a copy of his poems in Cambridge University Library and found that he had presented them, privately printed in Dresden in the 1850s and 60s, and the pages had never been cut; there was a kind of Henry Jamesian pathos about that for me; here I am simply wanting to give people some poems - By what mistake were pigeons made so happy - that is a wonderful opening line for a poem, an extraordinary vision of life and so on; he is a minor poet of real power on a lifelong anti-Christian crusade; if I write about Eliot it is that I think there is a potent and mischievous belief that pretty well everything in Eliot is vitiated by his misogyny and anti-Semitism; I don't believe he was a misogynist and I do believe that on occasion his poems, as he was occasionally in his life misogynistic, but I try to set that in a context of making it clear how difficult it is to talk about prejudice unprejudicially; it is true that one has got to be supplying or contesting, and I don't know what else one could be doing really; everything is revisionist; we talk about revisionist history but what is non-revisionist history? Its like people talking about a heuristic probe, what is a non-heuristic probe since heuristic means probing; it is the position of a lot of art; April is the cruellest month - which is either saying April, and not what you thought, November is the cruellest month, or April is the cruellest, and not what you might have thought, the tenderest month; it is contesting something as every poem or every work of art contests something; it might contest vacuity; there are a lot of writers about whom there isn't really a valuable appreciative force out there; nobody has had an idea about Charles Doughty for nearly a hundred years; if you are going to write about Doughty you have got to create or justify a belief; you have got to make good; you have got to give up the belief that you can prove, and you have got to halt the belief that you can make good, and in a world that thinks that all you have is an opinion, you resist the subjective, objective antithesis, you say with Empson - I will not use those words except when quoting somebody else; something terrible happened when the human race or the English language agreed that was it; that there were only two possibilities, it is subjective or objective; you try inter-subjective; that won't work for various reasons; the meaning of a word is not a subject of an opinion or an objective fact; it is a body of agreements built up over a very long period; so the belief that there are things that can be proved is essential, and the belief that there are things of the greatest value that cannot be proved but don't leave us with anarchy and caprice and whim; I can give reasons for thinking that this is an unjust accusation against Eliot; that the line - Female smells in shuttered rooms - if you believe it is misogynistic it is that you yourself have yielded to misogyny; the word smells is entirely neutral; it is not odours confected by the cunning French to disguise the good old hearty female stench which is unquestionably trading in misogyny; it might be dramatising it; the answer is it isn't actually; Dr Johnson is right on this as in almost everything; you are trying to - improve opinion into knowledge - and that itself is was revision of - elevate opinion to knowledge; he published it as that and later he revised it; the word elevate is not right; it has an illusion of feeling in it; you are not going to elevate it, you are going to improve it, and you are not going to elevate it to you are going to improve it into; and it is knowledge - it is not truth, its not fact, but it is knowledge; the great things in Leavis seem to me to be an accession of knowledge; “Sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep steady thy laden head across a brook”; Leavis simply says that the step across from one line to the next – “And sometimes like a gleaner thou dost keep steady thy laden head” - the internal rhyme is wonderful as it settles itself in the second line, that you are enacting and feeling something; you feel what it is as a gleaner with things on your head, in autumn when it might well be slippery to step across the brook; it is wonderfully experiential without being clever corporeal mimicry; I do feel very grateful for the critic who explains to me why and how that has worked upon me, while not thinking that that activity of explaining it is of the same order as Keats's doing it; it is not a smaller gratitude but a gratitude different in kind
1:10:59:13 I think the case for principles in itself is something; lecturing in China, I was to give the first talk, and it was clear to me that the first talk ought to cover a whole range of things and not be what I most like doing - here is how Hardy first had that stanza and here is how he revised it - I love doing that sort of thing; you couldn't start with that at the beginning of a conference so I did talk about principles, and it was important to me to think, as with Eliot, its the principles that have their application not only in literature but elsewhere; the great statements of principle such as Benjamin Disraeli saying, "Next to knowing when to seize and opportunity, the most important thing in life is when to forgo an advantage"; it is not a philosophy, it is not a theory, it is open immediately to the acknowledgement that there will be a great many cases when that isn't, and so on, but it is a wonderful formulation which is not formulaic; the way to get things done is not to care who gets the credit for doing them; now these seem to me to be very profound statements of principle exactly because they are representative but not universal; trying to find something that is not the single incidence nor the universal insistence is a great thing to be able to do; the corollary of that, I regret the way in which the notion of tolerance has been evacuated so that in America now it means not disapproving; whereas I thing tolerance requires disapproval in order to be tolerance, that is, to tolerate something is to disapprove of it but not to realize one's disapproval in any of the unjust, dishonourable, bad ways; that is, I speak against this but I do not deny the person tenure; so tolerance in America now means not disapproving and we have lost a very important social concept; I don't need a philosophy of tolerance though I believe that philosophers can give one; I need to be very clear of what the principle of tolerance is; its not that I would do nothing to try and oppose what you stand for; I will oppose it, but will not oppose it in the ways that can be fairly described as intolerance of it; there is a kind of gestalt thing; it has to do with what is this up against; I go back to my mother's midwife; what is the background against which this remark is to be understood at all; every letter in the Boston Globe believes that there is nothing to be said for anything other than the position that it adopts and that no price is paid for that position; I am working on the great Victorian judge and controversial public figure, James Fitzjames Stephen; I am a co-editor of an eleven volume edition of his works; I will edit the volume on the novel and journalism; Stephen to me is astonishing; he will say, here is somebody who fled the field of battle, you didn't execute him at the time, what should you now do? Should you as A and B have said deport him to Australia, and Stephen says, you should do such and such but there are disadvantages; if you do that you will gain A B C D E, but be perfectly clear you will lose F G and H; it is completely in the spirit of the age; the spirit of the age says if we do this we gain everything and we lose nothing; its how politics talks, its how universities...just anything is like that now; again, perhaps that goes back to the thought about being given pause, and its clear there are moments in history or ones individual life where the last thing one needs to be given is pause; my not liking the wholeness the theory claims; you can't hold both this theory and that theory; the pretence in literary studies has been that you can, that is, that half of the theoretical works have a dash of Marx and a dash of Freud, as though they were commendable views of the world; these are put together with something else and that shows they are interdisciplinary; it doesn't; it just shows there is somebody scrabbling around like the meal service in an animal house