Outside of a Dog (13 page)

Arnold’s views of the nature of ‘culture’, and its relation to England’s class structure, had been criticized as lacking in clarity and rigour, without an adequate basis
in systematic reflection. He was also accused, again with some justification, of having too little regard for the alleviation of the suffering of the masses. His response to such criticism was
invariably to smother his antagonist with approbation, and an apparent show of contrition:

I immediately suspected that Mr Arnold had the greatest contempt for Mr Harrison, whom he must have classed amongst his Philistines, and dismissed with a shrug and a smile. Quite the opposite:
Arnold confessed to shrieking with laughter at Harrison’s parody of him, and his riposte has real fondness in it. Though he was given to playful teasing, and occasionally to ridicule, the
sweetness and light that he recommends are most frequently encountered in his attitudes and in his style, as if the very mode and tonality of discourse established the truth of what he was
saying.

One doesn’t, finally, learn much from Matthew Arnold. Understanding of particular poets is rarely enhanced by his readings, while his analysis of the English class system is crass, risible
really. But none of this matters; you get inhabited by his voice, his temper and his tones. You enjoy Arnold because you are charmed by him, find his company instructive and congenial, and wish to
recommend him as if he were a new friend. His distinctive and immediately recognizable voice is worth assimilating, his demeanour wholly his own. The key is that his terms are basically
interchangeable: culture, sweetness, light, the best that has been known and thought, disinterestedness. Same thing, really. The style works by repetition of these terms and phrases until they have
a certain inevitability, as if it were impossible not to think like this, using these concepts and ideas. His antipathy to systematic thinking was entirely congenial to me.

But if Arnold was greatly admired in Oxford, his major follower in the twentieth century, F.R. Leavis, certainly was not. This was no surprise to me, because I had never heard of F.R. Leavis,
which occasioned as much astonishment amongst my tutors as my ignorance about the World Cup (which England had just won) caused amongst my fellow students. Was there no end to the cultural
insularity of Americans? Leavis’s work was only occasionally discussed in Oxford, usually slightingly, but he was a potent, if absent, presence. He was consistently referred to, with a
curious edge of contempt, as
Dr
Leavis. In Oxford, even wishing to have a doctorate (DPhil) was a symptom of self-aggrandizement and second-rateness, frequently to be found in Americans.
Traditionally, a genuinely clever graduate was offered a college teaching post after getting a brilliant First; if insufficiently bright to achieve that, then a BLitt (a lesser thesis degree) was
regarded as quite enough by way of research.

Leavis was not only one of those doctors, he taught at Cambridge, and there was – to the Oxford mind – something both unsavoury and unsound about him. He was an occasional speaker to
Oxford societies, but his visits always had something clandestine about them: scheduled in obscure places at odd times like secret assignations, barely advertised, they seemed open only to the
cognoscenti and the adventurous:
Dr F.R. Leavis will be Speaking in the Under Crypt of Keble College. Time to be Announced
. Leavis was, by our mild academic standards, dangerous. He seemed
always to be arguing with someone, disparaging someone else. The
Guardian
’s obituary of Leavis, in 1978, put this squarely: ‘His most murderous and underestimated weapon was
ridicule, which he deployed in lectures with the virtuosity of a music-hall star and with an insensitivity verging on paranoia.’ Had he chomped on one of his antagonists’ legs, no one
would have been surprised. He was a bite waiting to happen.

He had a reputation for clannishness, and his students revered him with an intensity that was almost alarming. (No one felt this way about Hugo Dyson.) Though in print Leavis could be ponderous,
in tutorials and lectures he was provocative, impish, and irreverent to an unexpected degree, even towards his most revered authors. T.S. Eliot, he was known to say, while pointing towards his
groin, had ‘something missing in the cellar’, Milton was ‘as mechanical as a bricklayer’, Othello, Antony and Cleopatra were derided as ‘great babies’. This
irreverence was wonderfully bracing, and left me, once I had heard the many stories about it, feeling freer to make personal judgements, and to be less guided by academic pieties.

It was particularly freeing with regard to Matthew Arnold, the occasion of my tutorial humiliation. I’d been caught in the pieties of practical criticism: a finished text is regarded as
somehow perfected, and the job of the critic is exegetical, to show how the poem works. But some poems don’t. ‘To Marguerite’ palpably doesn’t: it’s rubbish, full of
rotten poetic diction, and if you abandon the reflex of respect, you can use your critical tools to indicate why. There are very few really successful poems by Arnold, and it can be just as much
fun dismantling the bad ones as explicating the good.

Leavis had learned from Arnold, and extended his lesson: instead of using single lines of poetry as touchstones – how silly! how limiting! – he used whole
authors
. How did
this
writer compare to the standards of serious engagement with life set by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Joseph Conrad, D.H. Lawrence? And there is, surely, something both wrongheaded and
something sensible here. Wrongheaded in the pedestrian sense that my essay for Dyson had located, but sensible in the obvious sense that in saying that something is good we inevitably imply
‘better than
that
, but not great, like
this
’. We are implicitly pointing, comparing, ranking in some implicit hierarchy.

Though his reputation for sour ferocity was not entirely unearned, when I actually began to read Leavis there was a great deal to admire and to learn from. If he generated less sweetness than
Arnold, there was, in compensation, rather more light. I was particularly taken by a marvellous essay called ‘Literary Criticism and Philosophy’ (from
The Common Pursuit
) in
which Leavis puckishly reacts to a review of one of his books by René Wellek, whom he is delighted to label ‘a philosopher’, a category for which he has an amused contempt.
(Actually Wellek was a seminal figure in ‘new criticism’, and wished to provide for it some theoretical ground.) Leavis uses him, as Arnold had used Mr Frederic Harrison, as a figure of
fun: the grindingly theoretical practitioner, wholly lacking in tact, or as Leavis would have it, sensibility.

Wellek had requested that Leavis, before making his literary judgements, elucidate and defend the premises on which they were based. (C.S. Lewis has made a similar demand, accusing Leavis of
smuggling in a value system, based on ‘relevance’ and ‘maturity’, which he was unwilling to state or defend.) But Wellek’s statement of this criticism is utterly
pedestrian: Leavis has an implicit ‘norm’, he suggests, with which he judges every poet. ‘I would wish,’ said the exasperated Wellek, ‘that you had made your
assumptions more explicitly and defended them systematically.’ It might have been tempting to play skittles with such critical cack-handedness, but Leavis uses the occasion to make a subtle
statement of his critical practice that became, for me, a sort of touchstone in itself.

Criticism, so viewed, is a communal search for shared – for ‘true’ – judgement. Critical assumptions are undoubtedly lurking somewhere in the background, which is where
they should stay. Foolishly, Leavis almost immediately goes on, following this memorable statement about critical practice, to sketch his underlying belief:

This is so ponderous, so murky, so ill-framed, that it is no wonder that Leavis had resisted saying it: what is poetry
in general
? Why need
living
be described as
vulgar
?
Whose
actual
life? A
devitalizing
effect on what, or whom? Raised in a middle-class Cambridge family, privately educated, and a university don for his entire life, his knowledge of
the (vulgar?) working classes was derived largely from D.H. Lawrence, who couldn’t get away from them fast enough.

Leavis loved to provoke, and to provide something to argue against. He must have been scarily fun to study with, more stimulating for sure than the elegant and superior Dyson, with his lines of
true poetry. But it was impossible for me, a twenty-two-year-old immigrant fresh from the distant shores of American suburbia, to make much of this: to navigate between the urbanity of Arnold and
the ferocity of Leavis, to make anything substantial of these quintessentially English goings-on. Better to go back to the tennis courts, try to beat Ian Hewitt again, and confront the milder but
still patronizing attitudes of a set of English public school boys: ‘you don’t pronounce it a
ris
tocrat, it’s
ar
istocrat!’ At least I could tell them to go to
hell, but I didn’t. I was too shy.

I wasn’t shy, though, with the girl in the downstairs flat on Bardwell Road. As I was leaving the building with my flat-mate Vijaya’s fiancée Dineli, just opening the door of
the ground floor flat was a ravishing woman, who looked more like Julie Christie than Julie Christie did: fuller lips, slimmer, higher cheekbones. Her clothes – was she wearing a dress with
black polka dots on a white background? – draped her with effortless grace.

I made an abrupt volte face, and knocked on the door. Barbara Pettifer, as she was called, answered immediately.

‘Sorry to bother you,’ I said, ‘but I have just moved in. Could you tell me where the rubbish bins are? I’ve looked everywhere.’

She told me. I introduced myself and Dineli, and made some ingratiating small talk, before we moved off, ostensibly in search of the bins.

‘I am going to marry that woman,’ I said.

Dineli laughed.

‘You’re crazy. What do you mean?’

‘I want to be able to tell this story to our children, about how I met their mother.’

‘You’re crazy!’

The next evening I knocked on Barbara’s door, mug in hand, to say that I lacked the ingredients for my cup of tea, so could I borrow a cup of water? She sighed but invited me in, boiled a
kettle, and we had a companionable cuppa together. That weekend she came to our flat-warming party. (We’d bought a case of Mateus Rosé, and I was reprimanded by a friend who thought it
ostentatious to serve ‘fine wine’ at a party.) Barbara arrived in a newly fashionable short skirt, greatly enhanced by a red garter belt which looked both saucy and demure
simultaneously, had a few drinks and a dance, and talked captivatingly and intelligently about this and that.

The next Sunday morning she asked if I would like to go for a walk.

‘Sure,’ I said. ‘Where to?’

‘The Parks.’

‘What’s there?’

‘What do you mean? Trees, and the river. It’s lovely.’

‘What will we do there?’

‘You don’t do anything, you just go for a walk.’

What a romantic notion! I’d never gone for a walk before. I’d walked round golf courses, malls, campuses and cities, walked home from school or to the tennis club, but always in
pursuit of some end. It had never occurred to me that you might do such a thing just for the sake of it.

It was quite pleasant, in a desultory sort of way. I kept looking for somewhere to have coffee, but it was just a park. Mildly disappointing really, save for Barbara’s good company. Like
me, she’d only recently ended a serious relationship, and we shared details of the pain and loss. She had hastened to assure me from the very start that she had promised herself ‘never
to liaise with another American’, her previous boyfriend having been (like me) an American post-graduate, a tennis blue, and the driver of a new sports car. (Sometimes on her way out to work
in the morning – she was secretary to the principal probation officer of Oxford – she would give my blue Morgan a kick. ‘Bloody spoiled Americans,’ you could hear her
thinking.) I had reassured her that it was far too early to consider ‘liaising’, and that my intentions were honourable. They weren’t. How could they be with a creature so
luminously attractive?

As we strolled along, I was accosted by a hideous yappy dog, small and furious as a miniature Leavisite, who looked ever so keen to bite me on the ankle. His owner, a dowdy and upright dowager
of the kind that have virtually occupied North Oxford, followed shortly.

‘You must excuse him,’ she said, ‘he’s very nervous.’

‘I’m nervous too,’ I said crossly, ‘and I haven’t tried to bite him.’