Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Hollowa
- 2 First Impressions
- 3 Sanctimonious Prick?
- 4 Close reading
- 5 Time out
- 6 QDL
- 7 Class
- 8 Politics
- 9 France
- 10 The Richmond lecture
- 11 Loose end
- 12 Research
- 13 Theory
- 14 Australia
- 15 Shakespeare, Stendhal and James Smith
- 16 Teaching in the UK
- 17 Lawrence
- 18 … and eliot
- 19 Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- Index
8 - Politics
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Preface
- 1 Hollowa
- 2 First Impressions
- 3 Sanctimonious Prick?
- 4 Close reading
- 5 Time out
- 6 QDL
- 7 Class
- 8 Politics
- 9 France
- 10 The Richmond lecture
- 11 Loose end
- 12 Research
- 13 Theory
- 14 Australia
- 15 Shakespeare, Stendhal and James Smith
- 16 Teaching in the UK
- 17 Lawrence
- 18 … and eliot
- 19 Epilogue
- Acknowledgements
- Index
Summary
As Lucas's review of Fiction and the Reading Public might suggest, King's College, with its strong Bloomsbury connections, was often a centre of opposition to the Leavises. It was to another of its fellows, ‘Dadie’ Rylands, a former Etonian who, like Lucas, had begun his academic career in Classics and then switched to English, that Maurice Bowra wrote in order to give his impression of Leavis at about the time I was being taught by him. This was also the period when Leavis was developing a small following in Oxford so that it is almost certainly there that Bowra would have seen and heard him.
He had nothing to say, but the whole mystery was revealed. He is what our mothers would have called CHAPE L. The low, mousey voice, trailing into inaudibility at the end of each sentence, so suitable for the ministrations of the Lord's supper; the quotations from scripture in the form of Lawrence and James; the moral themes, Little Dorrit above all good, Dickens stands for life (eternal no doubt), to deny it is sin … above all the sense that if you sign with him on the dotted line, you are saved … I can now understand why our miserable undergraduates brought up in Little Bethels and Mount Zions and Bethesdas feel at home with him as with nobody else, especially as his Salvation means a great deal less work than the ordinary methods of studying the subject.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Memoirs of a LeavisiteThe Decline and Fall of Cambridge English, pp. 51 - 58Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2013