Appendix a the Leavises and Other Literatures

Appendix A The Leavises and Other Literatures Those who delight in discrediting or diminishing Leavis's achieve ment commonly cite his provinciality and bad manners for the coup de grace. But they usually give themselves away instead. To call Leavis provincial is patently absurd; and the charge of bad man ners is nine times out of ten highly debatable. Rene Wellek, a doughty combatant, calls Leavis 'provincial and insular' on account of three things: his 'concern with the Eng lish provincial moral tradition which he apparently fmds in Shakespeare, in Bunyan, in Jane Austen, in George Eliot, and D. H. Lawrence, all countryfolk'; his 'concern for his students, for the controversies of his university'; the fact that 'besides English and American, he seems to have no interest whatever in another literature' . 1 This is a caricature of Leavis, not the truth. The f1rst proposition neatly omits James and Conrad, to go no further; and as ifLeavis's interest in Shakespeare, and in promoting the great novelists, both American and English, as Shakespeare's successors, could be called provincial or insular! The second proposition trivialises the author of Educa#on and the University. (Ironically, there is an essay printed along with Wellek's in which Northrop Frye, with all the appearance of making new insights, discusses the university as a centre of spiritual authority in the modem world-Leavis's theme for more than twenty years before.) The third proposition, even if true, ignores a key premise with Leavis, that to say anything of weight the student of literature must become thoroughly at home in his own literature .first, before he branches out into other literatures. He made this point at the outset of his career in How to Teach Read ing: A Primer for Ezra Pound (1932) as part of a general caveat against 135 136 The Leavises on Fiction Pound's cosmopolitan dilettantism. He then reprinted the Primer in Education and the University. It would be truer to say that Leavis's interest in literature and in the university is broad, the reverse of provincial. But breadth of in terest with Leavis is not a matter of accumulating authors like luggage-stickers, but of bringing out the human significance of the few writers in the English language who manifest such signiftcance: Shakespeare, the major poets, and Shakespeare's successors in the novel: Jane Austen, Dickens, Hawthorne, Melville, George Eliot, Twain, Henry James, Conrad and D. H. Lawrence. To see more precisely how unprovincial this interest is we need only glance at Leavis's principal objectives in writing on James, Conrad and Mark Twain; at Mrs Leavis's in writing on Hawthorne; and at both the Leavises on Tolstoy. In doing which, we may see once again how useful it is to examine Mrs Leavis's work alongside her husband's. In The Great Tradition Leavis wanted to emphasise that the great James owed more to the American and English traditions of the novel than to the continental tradition-more to Hawthorne and Jane Austen than to Flaubert and Turgenev (see esp. pp. 144-5). He then rejnforced this point by discussing The Europeans as a dra matic poem, showing that James at his best was more than a Flaubertian stylist and had a Shakespearean power. He similarly contrasted the Shakespearean Conrad with the Flaubertian one (The Great Tradition, pp. 210-6). Next Mrs Leavis clarifted how James can be linked with Shakespeare through both Jane Austen and Hawthorne. In her critical introduction to Mansfield Park she showed how Jane Austen was reaching for and achieving a dramatic-poetic power that re sembled Shakespeare and strikingly anticipated James. Then she said that 'the essential Hawthorne' is a poet who created the 'lit erary tradition from which sprang Henry James on the one hand and Melville on the other', and who can have 'gone to school with no one but Shakespeare for his inspiration and model', for, reread ing his best work, One is certainly not conscious of a limited and devitalised talent employing a simple-minded pedestrian technique; one is con stantly struck by fresh subtleties of organisation, intention, ex pression and feeling, of original psychological insight and a new Appendix A 137 minting of terms to convey it, as well as of a predominantly dra matic construction. 2 And she backed this claim with searching analysis of Hawthorne's key works. The essay is a key one in Mrs Leavis's criticism, being her f1rst essay using (implicitly) the analogy 'the novel as dramatic poem'. Meanwhile, it is unwise to scoff at Leavis's use ofFlaubert. One might as well scoff at James's opinion of Flaubert, which critics never seem to do. Leavis constantly ·invokes Flaubert in full recog nition that he is the master of 'style' and 'form' in the novel judged purely according to aesthetic standards, but in full recognition too that the Flaubertian novel lacks the Shakespearean depth of subject-matter, unlike the great novel by Dickens or Conrad or James. And surely he could not better show the Shakespearean genius translated into the novel than by contrast with a master of the novel in another language. Without his citations of Flaubert, and without his essay on Tolstoy, certainly Leavis's criticism of the novel would have looked narrower. Mrs Leavis's aim with Hawthorne is paralleled by Leavis's aim with Mark Twain generally, and in particular with Twain's Pudd'nhead Wilson: aims that reveal an attitude the reverse of pro vincial or insular. Primarily Mrs Leavis wanted the English academic world to open its eyes to the fact that Hawthorne was a great writer. Likewise Leavis wanted English readers to see that Pudd'nhead Wilson 3 has the same pedigree as Huckleberry Finn. But in the process the Leavises found themselves having to chide and correct American criticism for not having given these great writers their due. Mrs Leavis found Hawthorne restricted semi apologetically to the inferior genre of 'allegory' by even the best American critics, F. 0. Matthiessen and Yvor Winters, and Leavis found that the conventional account of Twain made him only a great novelist of the American frontier. On the contrary, say the Leavises, these are writers who transcend frontiers amd genres, who though deeply American belong to the world, 4 and who in developing American idioms do so out of Shakespeare's language. 'The language of Hawthorne and Lincoln and Mark Twain is the language of Shakespeare', Leavis insists, and 'Shakespeare belongs no less to America than to England'. 5 What attitude could be less provincial? 138 The Leavises on Fiction The Leavises have written sporadically on American fiction since only in response to real and specific need: where they have seen a Shakespearean achievement undervalued or misread. They have otherwise a high regard for American criticism of its native fiction. 6 Confirmation of this is provided in Mrs Leavis's recently published 'new perspective' 7 on the later Melville-the first and only account of Melville by either of our critics. Acknowledging American critics in general and Richard Chase in particular, she fmds even so that the later Melville has suffered from two classes of reader: the Hawthornes (father and son), who labelled the post-Moby Dick output as 'incomprehensible' and 'morbid' (pp. 197 and 209), and modern readers who abuse their superior training in criticism by playing over-ingenious games with Melville's symbols and mean ings at the expense of attending to his truth-telling about American life in the 1850s. Thus, though 'a consensus of at any rate American literary criticism' fmds that The Confidence-Man 'contains Melville's most mature prose writing and some of his most interest ing thinking', interpretations are often 'ill-judged' and, for in stance, 'an inordinate amount of misplaced ingenuity has been devoted to discussion of exactly who the "avatars" of the Confi dence Man are' (pp. 211-2). This is to slight Melville's art, Mrs Leavis insists. His technique is not a device to fool the reader: it serves the ends of a 'serious and responsible creative mind' -a diagnosis of American society and values (p. 206). Here we see the familiar Leavisian concern with ends as well as with means, and with what ends the means are intended to serve: the truly creative writer invents and fashions his techniques, even ironic and comic ones, for deeply serious purposes-as does Melville. And, when it comes to unravelling Melvillean subtlety, Mrs Leavis reads as acutely as any. Her 'new perspective', then, enables readers (who need) to correct their overall view of Melville. The years 1853-6 are 'fertile years' (p. 198) in which, though land- and family bound and disheartened by the reception given to Moby Dick and Pierre, Melville commits himself with unquenched creativity to fresh concerns. Thus in The Piazza Tales he works out new tech niques for exploring social themes and examining the place of art in American life, as Hawthorne before him and James after. These tales are in many cases 'try-outs' for the 'ironic master piece', The Confidence-Man (pp. 197-9). The habit of posing alter native answers to particular problems (such as Bartleby's 'No' to a life of drudgery as against Helmstone's 'Yes' in The Fiddler, Appendix A 139 and the opposite outcomes of confidence in Benito Cereno), are seen to have become the 'all-embracing technique' of ambiguity in The Confzdence-Man (pp. 199-207). In the masterly tracing of this development, the scholar co operates with the critic and vice versa. In a resourceful reading of Cock-a-Doodle-Do! Mrs Leavis reveals how Melville drew upon Wordsworth (primarily 'Resolution and Independence', but two sonnets as well) so as to fashion a tale which both parodies Wordsworthian trust and yet at the same time affirms the con solatory powers of art.

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