Constable’s Plenty

Letters

Vol. 13 No. 17 · 12 September 1991

From Jonathan Bate

The argument of Romantic Ecology was that it might now be useful to read Wordsworth with the grain, as Victorians like Ruskin read him, instead of against it, as the most influential critics of the 1980s read him. John Barrell’s review (LRB, 15 August), which had a lightness and a wit that one does not associate with the prose of his books, was a splendid rebuttal of this contention, in that it showed what would be lost if people stopped reading against the grain. Where would we then go for the comic spectacle of the contention that Marxist praxis has not been notably ‘green’ (despite a certain ecological thrust in Engels) being converted into the accusation that New Historicist literary critics were responsible for the environmental devastation of Eastern Europe? Who but a reader against the grain could transform the argument that Margaret in ‘The Ruined Cottage’ and the dead girl in ‘A slumber did my spirit seal’ are not given immortality in a Christian heaven, but achieve a kind of immortality in nature (Wordsworth as Lucretian?), into the proposition that ruined cottages are all that women are good for while they’re still alive? But I fear that Professor Barrell and I are like the stooping poet and the little girl in Max Beerbohm’s caricature, ‘William Wordsworth in the Lake District, at cross-purposes’: he thinks that Romantic Ecology has no interest in ‘economic issues’, whereas I thought that one of its aims was to reassert Ruskin’s claim that the fundamental material basis of political economy is not money, labour and production, but ‘pure air, water and earth’.

Jonathan Bate
University of Liverpool

From Arthur Marwick

John Barrell is always a pleasure to read. His is a particularly fascinating type of fiction, invaluable as a stimulus and goad for those of us who believe that the historian’s reconstructions of the past are based on a methodology as rigorous as those of the natural scientists, involving the complex analysis of an enormous variety of primary sources; constant attention to the origins and validity of all concepts; care not to take multiple instances of ‘class awareness’ as proof of ‘class consciousness’; caution in approaching the staggering assumptions which lie behind the Marxist notion of ‘ideology’; rejection of the Hegelian tradition of reifying ‘eras’ and ‘systems’; and acceptance that Marx was a decent, ordinary guy who said some perceptive things, as well as, like the rest of us, some pretty daft ones.

Thus David Solkin’s Richard Wilson Exhibition of 1982-83 was certainly, as Professor Barrell says, a ‘key event’ of a sort: almost comic, in fact, in its relentless thrusting-down-the-throat of every stale and exploded Marxist cliché (‘thoughtful and carefully researched’, forsooth!). The problem with Marxist interpretations of history and art (and, therefore, with Cultural Materialism and New Historicism) is not that of political tendentiousness (who cares two pee for the views of the Daily Telegraph?), but that they trivialise the historical context to conform with a handful of Marxist formulae, and what’s more, are usually wrong. ‘Finding out’ in historical study is always an arduous and taxing procedure. It is upon patiently assembled, carefully validated detail (of the sort Professor Barrell scorns in the Parris and Fleming-Williams catalogue) that historical knowledge advances.

Arthur Marwick
History Department,

Vol. 13 No. 19 · 10 October 1991

From James MacGibbon

Henry Reed’s many friends and admirers must all be obliged to Jon Stallworthy for his concise biography of Henry and for ‘L’Envoi’ (LRB, 12 September). He mentions the poet’s ‘staggering memory’. Here is an example. Henry, knowing he needed some kind of psychiatric help, had read and admired the works of Melanie Klein (‘Eine Kleine Nachtmusik’ was the felicitous title, I think, of one of the Hilda Tablet radio series). When I told him, teasingly, that I was going to the theatre with her he asked to join us, and he did. After the performance she invited us back to her flat for coffee and little Viennese cakes. Almost before we were seated, Henry, a shy man, said: ‘Mrs Klein, I want to tell you how much I admire your books.’ She, who had a good sense of humour, replied, wagging a finger in amusement: ‘Young man, people are always telling me that and then I find they haven’t read my books!’ Henry then reeled off one or two misprints with page numbers. A happy evening ended with great success!

James MacGibbon
Manningtree, Essex

From John Barrell

‘The argument,’ says Jon Bate (Letters, 12 September), of his Romantic Ecology, ‘was that it might now be useful to read Wordsworth with the grain … instead of against it.’ It might well be: but first Professor Bate has to show us how he knows which way the grain runs in Wordsworth’s writing, and why he is so sure that his intentions and Wordsworth’s are the same. In the meantime, I can’t begin to recognise my remarks on his reading of ‘The Ruined Cottage’ in his own account of them. Nor did I suggest – well of course I didn’t – that Bate believes that ‘New Historicist literary critics were responsible for the environmental devastation of Eastern Europe.’

‘Marxist criticism,’ according to Romantic Ecology, ‘claims to bring texts down from the idealist stratosphere into the material world,’ but the Marxist version of materialism it thereby fosters is like ‘high capitalism’ in ‘privileging the wealth of nations over the wealth of nature’, with all that this has entailed for the destruction of the environment. All this is said in the context of some remarks about the industrial pollution of Eastern Europe and a comparison of Chernobyl with Three Mile Island. My point was simply that if Marxist criticism must bear some responsibility for encouraging the pollution of the planet, then surely Professor Bate’s apparently even-handed acknowledgment of the environmental damage done by high capitalism should lead him to attribute a similar responsibility to varieties of literary criticism which have been on easier terms with capitalism.

In my remarks on the Constable catalogue, I was not at all scornful, as Arthur Marwick (12 September) suggests, of its attention to factual detail, which I described as admirable. What I objected to was the catalogue’s refusal to make any attempt to attribute meaning to Constable’s picture’s, and its way of rejecting, without even a show of argument, the interpretations of other critics. 1 was not at all put out that Professor Marwick regards my own accounts of the past as fictitious, and of course I was pleased that he finds them so fascinating. As for the rest of his letter, I can’t imagine why he wrote it, and I have no idea what would be an appropriate comment on it. As far as I can make out, he wants to say that no historians are Marxists, that David Solkin’s Richard Wilson catalogue is a tissue of Marxist clichés, that Marxist interpretations of history and art are ‘usually wrong’, and that Cultural Materialists and New Historicists are ipso facto Marxist. He also seems to think that I am a Marxist, which I’m not at all sure about. If he cares to say why he thinks these things, I may care to roll up my sleeves and reply, but I doubt it.

John Barrell
University of Sussex

From Fred Inglis

I write in a spirit of considerable gingerliness to take exception to John Barrell’s treatment of Constable (LRB, 15 August). Not only is anyone who loves the paintings deeply in his debt for his treatment of both Constable and Turner in the past, but he has shown himself to have a quite terrific way with those who disagree with him. Surely the thing about Constable is exactly that people can find in his pictures an answer to their need ‘to identify a people and its territory’. Somewhere in the preface to Single Spies, Alan Bennett says something to the effect that treason has fallen out of fashion because people are no longer clear what there is to betray in their country, and do not know what to love in it. Amen to that, we might say, after 12 years of Mrs Thatcher and her Goths in Parliament. The power of Constable is, however, that he shows so plainly what there is to love.

It hardly matters whether a day in the country is spent in the Home Counties (at the name of which John Barrell might well have a number of his characteristically bitter jokes to make), or Constable’s so unhomely East Anglia, or among Thomas Girtin’s Yorkshire abbeys. The resonant name of John Constable serves, as they say, as signifier for all these other names which so reliably and reassuringly teach millions what to feel in front of their pictures and their metonymous landscapes. Patriotism is now none the worse for having shrunk to these familiar and uncontentious places.

Fred Inglis
University of Warwick