THE NOTICING, reviewing and criticising of works of literature to some extent merge into each other, and one is aware of a cline in the critical and pseudo-critical profession or pseudo-profession. At the bottom lies the bare notification of the act of publishing – ‘Albert Throgmorton’s new novel will please his fans’ – and at the summit we expect to find the leisurely, scholarly (though not necessarily elegant) consideration of Throgmorton’s new work, relating it to his previous work or the work he may yet produce, to the entire genre in which he practises, to the school, real or imagined, of which he may be considered to be a member, to the moral and aesthetic climate of his day and previous days, tentatively or dogmatically placing him in the whole corpus of literature of which he is a corpuscle, judging him in terms of an aesthetic or a moral system, in short taking him seriously. This kind of criticism, which may call itself a review, is sometimes termed academic. It may not necessarily be produced by academics, but it presupposes conditions associated with academia – leisure, a library, regular discourse with well-stocked and cultivated minds. It is not journalistic reviewing in the sense that most people, inevitably pejoratively, take that activity to be. The journalistic reviewer has little time, little space and often little learning. His tasks are imposed, he is expected to entertain as well as fulfil the first obligation of the reviewer – to notify that a book exists and to make a rough judgment on it (a judgment he may, even in a short time, regret).
It is possible for the rapid scribbler of a brief notice to disclose a clarity of insight denied to the academic critic (‘Mr Eliot’s The Waste Land extrapolates a personal sexual crisis on to a decaying civilisation observed during an exceptionally dry summer’), but we expect critical insight to be one of the rewards of long brooding and wide reading. Academic criticism does not smell of the need to earn a quick fee; in this sense it is civilised, and civilised also in that is does not obtrude unseemly spite or bad temper, or the wilful ignorance that goes along with them, on to what should be an objective assessment of a creative writer’s work. There should also be a dignified humility appropriate to the practitioner of a comparatively lowly vocation. An academic critic may not like Milton, but he knows that Milton is better than he is. When F.R. Leavis inveighed not merely against C.P. Snow’s doctrine of the Two Cultures but again C.P. Snow’s own novels, he was not behaving as we think an academic should. There was altogether too much spite and dogmatism in Leavis, as well as palpable ignorance and obscurantism, and yet he is taken to be the very model of the academic critic.
The academic critic can let us down as spectacularly as any fee-grabbing Sunday reviewer. Leavis refused to believe that the art of fiction existed after D.H. Lawrence. William Empson was fond of asserting that ‘there is no good writing to be found anywhere now’ and said that ‘Byron… only at the end of his life escaped from the infantile incest fixation upon his sister which was till then all that he had got to say’, though Byron did not meet his half-sister till he was twenty-four. T.S. Eliot foisted on to a whole generation of literature students the fallacy that the Elizabethans got their five-act division from Seneca. Eliot, indeed, perpetrated a number of ill-considered judgments – about certain people not being men enough to be damned (highly Kiplingesque), about Marlowe as primarily a caricaturist, about the dissociation of sensibility as a historical event, and so on. He can be excused because he was practising literary journalism in a not entirely academic way: he had the Criterion to bring out. His critical misjudgments can usually be excused also because he was a poet, as perhaps Empson’s can. Poetry is characterised by its daring shots in the dark, and the daring is permitted to qualify the sobriety of the critic.
There is a deliberate ‘false note’ in my first paragraph. I have suggested that academic critics might be prepared to write at length about Albert Throgmorton, but they are rarely willing to accord a living writer the full critical treatment, though they may stoop to the occasional brief review. They have a professional stake in the writers of the past, since literary history does not encompass the present, but they are perhaps right, though probably for the wrong reasons, to be cautious in their approach to the contemporary. It is difficult to assess a living writer. The Sunday reviewer takes a short view of the author he has under consideration, relating him to the taste of a segment of his own age; the true critic has to justify his assessment in terms not only of the past but of the future too. Certain authors have appeared in our time in whom serious critics have scented the quality of permanence – William Golding, for instance, perhaps less because of his aesthetic content than his ludic treatment of original sin, which is a venerable doctrine safe to endorse. No academic critic ever had to live to regret his espousal of Hugh Walpole (despite Henry James’s enthusiasm in 1916) or, in our own age, the verse plays of Christopher Fry. While we deplore Leavis’s blindness about the post-Laurentian novel, we have to admire with a certain reluctance the closing of the eyes of less eminent academic critics to it. They are protecting their nests, but they are also exhibiting the prudence not permitted to the mere reviewer.
As a living writer, though old as well as old-fashioned, I have to welcome PhD theses and even published books about my work, most of which inevitably emanate from the United States, though Kantian critiques sometimes thud in from West Germany and Crocean dissertations from Turin or Bari. There is a certain mean satisfaction in recognising oneself as recognised, but much more important is the writer’s need to be understood and thus understand himself. The writer is written, as the post-structuralists tell us, and his work is the product of forces over which he has little conscious control (though far more than Derrida thinks). The academic thesist may find more in his work than may be there, but no writer is likely to reject the imputation of depth where he had thought himself to be shallow, nor the crediting of him with an erudition he does not possess. If he enjoys the flattery, that is because he needs the unction after his summary, and often hostile, treatment by reviewers.
No novelist likes to spend years on the construction of a fictionalised life of Napoleon in the shape of a Beethoven symphony only to have this work dismissed in the Sunday press as a ‘resounding tinkle’. He likes even less disclosure of evidence that the journalistic reviewer has not read his work or has read it cursorily. A novel I wrote on the theme of free will and the nature of evil was dealt with very summarily and denounced as ‘a nasty little shocker’. The academic thesis is a salve to deep wounds. Authors, especially novelists, are easily hurt and brood excessively about being misunderstood: the immaturity of response to bad reviews has to be deplored, but a certain emotional infantility seems to be one of the conditions for creating art.
No writer objects to the review which tells him what his work really means, though this runs counter to his own conscious intention, or rebukes him for remediable faults (though few faults in writing are). But such reviews rarely occur, and what the writer is most strongly aware of in journalistic notices is a prepared position, a ready-made judgment unqualified by the act of reading, personal malice, the lack of humility appropriate to a self-publicist. Few reviews amount to genuine criticism, yet it is criticism that the writer needs. The academic critic is his ally in the desperate struggle to make words make sense.
I have, then, to posit a situation the reverse of that once romantically held – Walther against the Meistersinger, Dylan Thomas scared of I.A. Richards. The writer’s enemies are among the journalists, his friends, at least potentially, in academia. It is only academia, in the post-Leavis era, which is equipped with the tools for literary appraisal. No working author, unless he is David Lodge or Malcolm Bradbury, professionally concerned as an academic with theories of narratology and post-structuralism but also out in the windy field of the practising novelist, can hope to understand fully the processes which produce his art. He recognises that modern criticism is no longer Quiller-Couch amateurism or the vague Leavisite commitment to ‘life’, but he has not himself either the time or the temperament to arm himself with the right critical battery. He must leave that to the academics.
I say that the academic is potentially the friend of the writer, but, while the whole of the literary past remains to be explicated, there is no possibility of the forging of a healthful relationship between the living author and the professional critic. For caution has to remain: only the future can decide who is as good as, or not too inferior to, William Golding. But, in dealing with the literature of the past, the academic critic can set for the living author the standards by which he would wish to be judged. The reviewer can do nothing for him.
I imply, of course, academic criticism at its best – meaning at its best informed and full of informed insight. It remains difficult, however, to expunge the pejorative which is attached to the term ‘academic’. The academic fugue is form without feeling: one shudders at the notion of the academic, as opposed to campus, novel. There is a load of academic rubbish regularly disgorged by the university presses, lifeless ill-written pseudo-criticism whose only purpose is to gain tenure for the author. There is also the cashing in, to the end of professional promotion, on a fad which develops into an industry whose operatives ensure it will be self-perpetuating. I am thinking particularly of the academic Joyce industry, which should by now have decided to train its techniques on authors less cultic – H.G. Wells, for instance, or Arnold Bennett. When, in the late 1930s, I first read Joyce, it could never have been dreamt that he would become the occasion of endowed chairs and international conferences. He was banned, a literary outsider. He is less thrilling to read now that the professors have domesticated him.
What is being done to Joyce in the universities exemplifies the dangers of academic leisure, the presence of unformed student minds that have not yet learned to answer back, bookishness, colleagual discourse, and sheer professorial ingenuity. There is plenty of wayward trickiness in Joyce, a sufficiency of subtexts, evidence of the language manipulating the author, as well as cabbalistic arithmology, but it took Richard Ellmann, after proving himself to be one of the pioneers of textuality, to remind us that Ulysses is a novel about the need for love. It seems to me often that what the professorial industrialists are doing to Joyce they could well be doing to Ian Fleming and Frederick Forsyth, who are also writers written and could, with sufficient probing and the occasional world conference, disclose marvels of crypto-symbolism. The academic critics have been granted by the over-ingenious French an opportunity to deploy criticism for its own sake, an autonomous craft like juggling. Still, the professors are all we have.
I include among the professors those who merely take on the temporary honorific after displaying, outside academia, the skills that academia is there to promote – men like Edmund Wilson, whose Axel’s Castle opened to my generation the door to modernism and showed the pundits within the ivied walls how learning could be worn lightly and expressive exactitude be congruent with elegance. The critical spark has to be there to begin with, but only the conditions associated with academia can blow it and make it flare. My own literary career, such as it has been, owes much to certain academics, and the term academic criticism has for me, living outside the walls, no whiff of dead scholarship, condescension, or the disparagement of those who, working with the safe dead, refuse to grant life to the living.
Times Literary Supplement, 14 November 1986