Gravity’s Python
Raymond Williams, 4 December 1980
What is the difference between a satirist and an impressionist? I don’t know – what is the difference between a satirist and an impressionist?
Raymond Williams
Raymond Williams was born in 1921, the son of a Welsh railway worker. His books include Culture and Society, The Long Revolution, The Country and the City and Marxism and Literature. He taught at Cambridge for many years and was professor of drama there from 1974 to 1983. He died in 1988.
Isn’t the news terrible?
Raymond Williams, 3 July 1980
‘I see the news is bad again.’ The banal phrase punctuates my memories of the late 1930s. I remember an adolescent anger that people would not name the things that were happening: the invasion of Austria; the cession of the Sudetenland; the invasions of Czechoslovakia and Albania – all packaged as ‘the news’. While in London it no doubt seenmed ridiculous that Chamberlain referred to Czechoslovakia as a far-off country of which we knew little or nothing. I could see, there in Wales, that what he said was true for these railwaymen and farmers, whose gravity and abstraction, at this level of affairs, at once puzzled and irritated me.
Pieces about Raymond Williams in the LRB
Remembering the taeog
D.A.N. Jones, 30 August 1990
Rightly admired as a critic, an interpreter of ‘culture and society’, Raymond Williams was disappointing as a writer of fiction. The Eggs of the Eagle is the second volume of...
Moooovement
R.W. Johnson, 8 February 1990
Raymond Williams’s death in January 1988 has been followed by an avalanche of obituarial tribute. To some extent, the tributes were a matter of the Left giving a last, sad cheer for one of...
Dark Spaces
Dinah Birch, 28 September 1989
One of Raymond William’s polemical purposes in People of the Black Mountains, his final fiction, is to affirm that Wales has its own distinct identity, founded in unremembered time which reaches beyond...
Whakapapa
D.A.N. Jones, 21 November 1985
Security is the problem that exercises both Philip Roth and Raymond Williams. The sort of ‘security’ I mean is the sort that spreads a feeling of insecurity – a fear of...
Examples
Denis Donoghue, 2 February 1984
I’ll talk mostly about Towards 2000, so I should give a brief account of Writing in Society and Radical Earnestness to begin with. Radical Earnestness is a brisk survey of a...
Literature and the Left
Marilyn Butler, 18 August 1983
It is a surprise to find Raymond Williams, in the year of his retirement as Professor of Drama at Cambridge, editing a series called ‘Literature in History’. In a writing career that...
The Quest for Solidarity
John Dunn, 24 January 1980
The relation between politics and letters is necessarily a dangerous liaison, and the questions which it raises are huge, blunt and disobliging. Acknowledged too readily, it is apt to highlight...
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