From the source
Peter Ackroyd
Thought, Words and Creativity F. R. Leavis (Chatto and Windus £4.00) In this latest book, Dr Leavis forgoes his recent polemical essays and reverts to the works of D. H. Lawrence. Since Dr Leavis is the last critic which this country or its universities will produce, his decision—at the age of eighty—to go back to the worksof our greatest modern novelist is a significant one. He returns to the major texts of Lawrence in order to elucidate and to sustain what have now become Leavis's major concerns: 'life'. 'thought' and 'civilisation'. To wrench these terms out of context is to do great violence to the actual subtlety and complexity of Dr Leavis's language, which works characteristically by suggestion and by a gradual accumulation of meaning. And this latest book is indeed, in this sense, the most difficult. But it is difficulty of a fruitful kind. His tone has remained caustic; he makes established persons feel uneasy.
Thought. Words and Creativity is, as its title suggests, a more 'abstract' study than the earlier D. H. Lawrence: Novelist. The book has a convincingly theoretical cast as Leavis proceeds at once to discuss Lawrence's 'vital intelligence', that 'living integrity as the actual principle of life'. It is easy to jib at these captivating but ostensibly meaningless formulations (we prefer books on Shelley and Harassment, we even prefer Oxford academics enthusing over Ted Hughes) but to treat them as propositions—to be verified by analytical methods—is to miss the significance of Leavis's tone. He is a critic who proceeds by indirection to the heart of his design, a writer who prefers the constant accretion of sense, the steady construction of meaning which is only significant when seen as a whole. That is why this book continually turns back upon itself, why it repeats certain phrases of Lawrence over and over again, why it returns to certain central distinctions and never rests in any final con clusions. D. H. Lawrence: Novelist was longer but sharper; it had more verve, and more hrio. It knew its enemies, but it knew its strength. In this book. Leavis leaves to one side the polemical material of the earlier book in order to concentrate upon the one, salient thing : the language of Lawrence. And that, even in extracts, is still a marvel to read. After the opening chapter, from which the book takes its title (and which was first published in the Spectator in a slightly different form). Leavis begins with an analy sis of the relative failure of The Plumed Ser then goes on to investigate Women in Love. His method is one of a generalised but authoritative going-over of' the text, quoting a passage and then eliciting its assumptions before proceeding to another extract, the insights of which are employed to add to and sustain earlier ones. Although he would no doubt resent the notion, Leavis comes in some places close to the descriptive methods of Martin Heidegger in a work like The Essence of Poetry. Leavis uses a no less abstract and theoretical prose which is no less firmly based upon concrete models. Lawrence's words being employed in much the same way as Holderlin's lyrics. Certainly Leavis's study of Women in Love is less localised than it was in his earlier book, but there Middleton Murry acted as Leavis's foil and here he is engaged only with the wt iting itself. The prose may be less sharp, but it has more resonance: '... the creativity threatened by industrial civilisation, with its power to mechanise what lives in it or by it, depends on the robustly individual human being—the profound creative individuality that can draw on the source that lies deep down, uncontrolled by the ego, and is the source of spontaneity.' This is not negligible or inarticulate writing, however fashionable it may now be to sneer at it; and if literary criticism can ever lay claim to moral seriousness, then it is indisputably from passages of this kind.
But it seems to me that Leavis is our last critic. Humane criticism has now played itself out, and has become a vehicle for such external pursuits as sociology and anthropology. The new positivists have taken over in the universities, with their creepy Francophilia. And even among the admirers of Leavis, the particular emphases of his language —'ourcivilisation desperately lacks the thought it has lost the power even to recognise as thought'—have turned into a prescriptive moralism which does violence to proper criticism. For despite Leavis's attention to the 'words on the page' (an abstraction which has been widely misunderstood and abused since its formu
Spectator 28 August 1976 lation), he is constantly and irritably reach:ing beyond the text—to grasp and elucidate 'truths' which, I believe, literature neither creates nor reveals. After a discussion of The Rainbow in this book, for example, he goes beyond the unnatural boundaries of the` fiction : 'But we didn't create ourselves; and the sole access to the promptings to he gathered from the unknown—from which life and creativity enter us—is by the well:: head, which is deep below our valid thought.
Creativity here, and by implication the works of language which are created, is seen as deriving from a context beyond the con-. fines of literature and of language. Both the strength and the failure of Leavis's mature criticism rest in his con stant attempt to find 'values'—whethef spiritual, moral or humane—in literature which are simply not there to find. Is literature 'thought about life', as Leavis insists, or is it thought about language? Or, to put it in the context of another of Leavis's terms, is there actually a 'reality that trans' cends language' and, even if there is, can such a thing be elicited from a reading of Lawrence's fictions? Language is thus seen, as embodying truths, and, however 'concrete and however 'actual' it may be, it becomes a form of rhetoric used for external and utilitarian ends. This cannot, I think, be right—and this is partly the reason win' Leavis has returned so insistently and sn, creatively to Lawrence's texts, teasing out ol them confirmation and sustenance. He Iris takes their nature, and so will often beconle over-emphatic in their defence. His urgencY and his moral fervour reclaim the finest spirit of our literary humanism, but his fel' your serves to confirm, too, the pressureS under which it is legitimately giving waY.
But again, and it bears repeatingin thus
face of so much bland and meretricion opposition, Leavis is a great critic preciselys becauses he refuses to recognise this. He I uniquely responsive because he is so eln: phatic about the nature of the object ,1! hand. That is why he is so exactly right aboal 'the failure of civilisation'. At certain Points in this study Leavis discusses such pef
dar
cals as the English Review and The Cale: d of Modern Letters, and the unacknowledge4 theme of this book is 'the disappearancetn an educated, reading public'. current contempt for standards evinced co such state organisations as the Arts Count° it is difficult not to assent —'And •1
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i yen . bncy destroy the educated public is to ,tig English literature—past literature as a influence, and the possibility of signific'. new creation in the present'. I do not t.11.1,11a that Leavis's conception of 'fiteraturei , just one, but that does not deflect front lerns. rightness of his judgment in these Ma 'lin It is the mark of a great critic that he ("bewield irreconcilable or insupPortabic fiefs into judgments of the widest signific.311;1 and validity; so that uncertainties of c. rl" response can lead to the major certaintYb; the central, human response. Dr Leavls„his more than any other English critic ol century, made that mark.
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