Cambridge Theatre

Letters

Vol. 4 No. 17 · 16 September 1982

SIR: The hectoring captiousness of Donald Davie’s review of Sue Lenier’s poems (LRB, 19 August) is a replay of one of the oldest and easiest routines in the repertoire of critical scurrility. It operates on roughly the same intellectual level as the vacuous overpraise of her by some newspapers, and is likely to do her less harm. I don’t think she needs any defence from me.

But as one of the people included in the review’s lordly reference to ‘various academic persons’, I’ll just recall that Professor Davie is himself an academic person, and has been one for longer not only than most of us but than the entire lifetime of Miss Lenier.

I should also say, as a matter of simple fact or ‘accuracy’ (a virtue to which Professor Davie’s attachment is notoriously stronger in profession than in performance), that I have never been an ‘intimidated colleague of the late F. R. Leavis’, nor even an unintimidated one. Professor Davie was, on the other hand, both a colleague and intimidated, as he likes to remind us. It would be nice if he relaxed his habit of treating other people as if they were extensions of his own autobiography.

C.J. Rawson
Department of English, University of Warwick

Donald Davie writes: As Claude Rawson is my professional colleague, so both of us have been colleagues of the late F. R. Leavis. He dissociates himself from ‘the vacuous overpraise’ of Sue Lenier’s poetry ‘by some newspapers’. What he wrote of that poetry himself was: ‘There is no doubt of the power. The best poems are shrill in the good sense of shrillness: at the acute cutting edge of feeling. The best things in Swansongs are like that, fierce and clear. The sequence has virtuosity and manages its “literary” ancestry (Yeats, Baudelaire) with a good deal of sureness.’ In my review I gave reasons, backed by examples, for thinking this as excessive and as vacuous as anything that had appeared in a newspaper, and more dangerous because subscribed to by a person of academic eminence. On this issue, the only one that matters, Professor Rawson says nothing at all.

Vol. 4 No. 18 · 7 October 1982

SIR: If, as Donald Davie now suggests, ‘intimidated colleagues of the late F. R. Leavis’ means everyone who taught English in universities when Leavis was alive, then either his language has become imprecise beyond normal serviceability, or his sense of reality has deserted him totally. In a writer of his eminence, such things must be felt to ‘matter’, although the work of the young poet whom he has stridently and bullyingly misrepresented does indeed matter more. My point on the latter remains that she needs no defence from me, or not against criticism of the calibre of: ‘Now, there’s a question, especially since this filly, be it noted, is in her high-stepping action “gleesome”.’

Claude Rawson
Department of English, University of Warwick