Placing Leavis
Geoffrey Hartman
- The Leavises: Recollections and Impressions edited by Denys Thompson
Cambridge, 207 pp, £15.00, October 1984, ISBN 0 521 25494 9
- The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848-1932 by Chris Baldick
Oxford, 264 pp, £19.50, August 1983, ISBN 0 19 812821 5
- Radical Earnestness: English Social Theory 1880-1980 by Fred Inglis
Robertson, 253 pp, £16.50, November 1982, ISBN 0 85520 328 5
- The Critic as Anti-Philosopher: Essays and Papers by F.R. Leavis edited by G. Singh
Chatto, 208 pp, £9.95, November 1982, ISBN 0 7011 2644 2
The astonishing importance of Leavis in the English academic consciousness does not seem to be a passing fad. The scandal-maker of the 1930s became, by a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy, part of the saving remnant on which the future of reading would depend. The photo on the cover of Denys Thompson’s The Leavises shows him in a jacket impermeable to the insults of time and with the open shirt of a Labour leader. He looks indeed, as his wife wrote of both of them, ‘grey-haired and worn down with battling for survival in a hostile environment’. Queenie Leavis stands beside him, also dressed simply, sharing his pursed lips and focused eyes that tilt only slightly towards a better world. Together they make a painful hendiadys, an icon of the threadbare, indomitable British intellectual. The snapshot catches something grim and mortal: an embattled uniformity, rather than their spirit active for half a century to save a culture that had lost, so Leavis wrote, ‘any sense of the difference between life and electricity’.
You are not Logged In
- If you have already registered login here
- If you are a print subscriber using the site for the first time please register here
- If you are not yet a subscriber you can subscribe here
- If you are a member of a subscribing institution or University library please login here
- If you have an Institutional print subscription and online access is not included, find out about our Institutional online subscriptions
Letters
Vol. 7 No. 2 · 7 February 1985
From Michael Tanner
SIR: Geoffrey Hartman is well known to prefer literary theorising to the arduous and tiresome business of actually reading and responding to literary texts. Nonetheless it is astonishing – and even though he is a Professor of English at Yale – to find him attributing to Hopkins two of T.S. Eliot’s most famous lines: ‘The intolerable wrestle / With words and meanings’ (LRB, Vol. 7, No 1). Apart from a knowledge of Four Quartets which one would have thought could be taken for granted, it is inconceivable that Hopkins should have ever written those lines. Perhaps there is something to be said for Practical Criticism. I should add that there is nothing in Raymond O’Malley’s article in The Leavises, which Hartman is purportedly paraphrasing, to indicate that he is guilty of so gross a misattribution.
Michael Tanner
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
Vol. 7 No. 4 · 7 March 1985
From Jean MacGibbon
SIR: Professor Geoffrey Hartman, in his review ‘Placing Leavis’ (LRB, Vol. 7, No 1), writes of the Leavises: ‘Together they make a painful hendiadys.’ Hands up all you readers who had to look this word up. And the Leavises so keen on plain English!
Jean MacGibbon
Manningtree, Essex
Vol. 7 No. 6 · 4 April 1985
From Michael Tanner
SIR: I pointed out (LRB, Vol. 7, No 2) that Geoffrey Hartman had quoted two of T.S. Eliot’s most famous lines in his review of The Leavises and said they were by Hopkins. He replies (LRB, Vol. 7, No 3): ‘A lapse is a lapse.’ Well yes: but there are certain lapses that one would not have thought it possible to make: getting one’s own name wrong, for instance, or saying that Macbeth’s most famous monologue begins ‘To be or not to be’. If one commits such lapses, clinical questions, or questions concerning one’s basic competence, arise. I think Professor Hartman’s lapse is of the second kind. Having first used the ‘For Heaven’s sake, it could happen to anyone’ tactic, Hartman moves on to saying that I ‘dignify’ his lapse as a ‘gross misattribution’, thus displacing emphasis from his main concern – to clarify Leavis’s place in a wider context. I didn’t intend to dignify anything, and it seems to me a very odd use of the language to say that my expression did that. I would now like to dignify Hartman’s piece further by saying that it was unhelpful, pretentious and meandering waffle, and that his misattribution must have been overlooked by countless readers because they were too bored, if they had got that far, to notice anything in particular.
Michael Tanner
Corpus Christi College, Cambridge
From Alastair Ross
SIR: Jean MacGibbon (LRB, Vol. 7, No 4) invited readers to put their hands up if they had had to look up the meaning of ‘hendiadys’, used in Geoffrey Hartman’s review ‘Placing Leavis’ (Vol. 7, No 1). That meaning had been drummed into my head more than fifty years earlier, and I was glad to find that it had stuck there (along with aposiopesis, litotes and anacoluthon), so I did not need to put up my hand. Anyway, what was Jean MacGibbon really saying? That your reviewers should not use long words? Surely not. But if she meant that they should not misuse long words, I would agree. Geoffrey Hartman said of the Leavises, looking at a photo of them on a book jacket: ‘Together they make a painful hendiadys.’ How do they? I cannot see any parallel between Frank and Queenie and ‘grace and favour’ (example of hendiadys in Fowler’s Modern English Usage, 1965), or their relevance to ‘Use of two Substantives coupled by a Conjunction for a Substantive and Adjective’ (definition in Kennedy’s Revised Latin Primer, 1921). Hartman might, of course, have said ‘painful Siamese twins’ (Fowler, page 554), but would that be a petitio principii (page 449)?
Alastair Ross
London W5
