Even paranoids have enemies
Frank Kermode
- F.R. Leavis: A Life in Criticism by Ian MacKillop
Allen Lane, 476 pp, £25.00, July 1995, ISBN 0 7139 9062 7
‘We were – and we knew we were – Cambridge – the essential Cambridge in spite of Cambridge.’ So F.R. Leavis in an exultant moment; and this biography for the most part concentrates on the local conflicts and gestures of defiance the remark implies. To a biographer who was also a pupil of Leavis, this limitation will have seemed natural, inevitable. Yet in fact Leavis’s influence extended far beyond Cambridge, and even beyond the schools in which his loyal followers taught English and from which, if they could, they sent their pupils to Downing College for more advanced indoctrination by the master or his acolytes. As a provincial student in the late Thirties I was scolded for impudently and prematurely imitating his voice, mimicking those apparently incontrovertible judgments, trying to master what is here called ‘the wry jeer’.
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