Cultural Cohesion (48 page)

“Yeats: The Problem and the Challenge” isn't up to the Eliot piece for several reasons. To begin with, it is too restrictive: “Sailing to Byzantium,” “Byzantium” and “Among School Children” are the only qualifiers for the title of “fully achieved thing.” This
has
to be wrong. In outflanking the dreaded “fully equipped commentators” F. R. Leavis is concerned with identifying and isolating the major poems (not just the many Yeats poems “worth having”) which do not require “that one should bring up any special knowledge or instructions from outside.” But here one of his most valuable strains of thought, the one which has always been able to evaluate academic pressures and characterize rampant scholarship as a cultural threat, has been mightily over-asserted. Yeats's poems explain each other where they do not explain themselves, and it is possible to go a long way towards a full understanding of his work without ever once opening any ancillary volume by him or anybody else: his intention of writing a magic book of the arts was fulfilled.

F. R. Leavis's whole argument—it is intricately developed—about the extra-poetical in Yeats could as well be detached from that poet and attached to, say, Eliot—in relation to whom, it seems plain, some
very
extra-poetical considerations are gone into in the lecture next door. Looking at the two essays in conjunction, it seems likely that such considerations are rationalized when admiration is total and developed into a limiting commentary when it is not.

It is characteristic of Yeats to have had no centre of unity, and to have been unable to find one. The lack is apparent in his solemn propoundings about the Mask and the Anti-self, and in the related schematic ­elaborations.

Not the same, apparently, as being solemn about the Etruscans.

Throughout this piece on Yeats, the appreciation of the few poems does not link up with the limiting of the many: the appreciation and the limiting do not spring from the one impulse, despite the vigour with which singleness of viewpoint is asserted. It can be added, perhaps impertinently, that this lecture, like the others, contains several endearingly familiar turns of speech and all on its own offers us one of the master's most memorable put-downs.

I remember vividly the impact of
The Tower
, of which I have a first edition, acquired in the way in which I have acquired such first editions as I have had—I bought it when it first came out.

What a burn! Yet here again you see what he is driving at; rejecting the fashionable, recalling the essential.

I don't believe in any “literary values,” and you won't find me talking about them; the judgements the literary critic is concerned with are judgements about life.

When a man offers “the friction, the sense of pregnant arrest, which goes with active realizing thought and the taking of a real charged meaning,” he is not offering something he will be honoured for in any conventional way. But as a living force in the plurality of society his recognition is assured, and his name becomes a known quality.
Lectures in America
helps to define that quality even more closely.

Times Literary Supplement
, 1969

POSTSCRIPT

Trying to get Queenie Leavis out of the road in one line was the biggest single
bêtise
I committed in that period. It was worse than a crime: it was a mistake, because the old lady boiled over and went for me. She wanted to know why someone so obviously unqualified had been sent to judge her work. She was right about that, although not completely. I had indeed not read much of the recent scholarship on the subject of her lecture, “Wuthering Heights”; but I had read
Wuthering Heights
recently enough to wonder if she had ever read it at all, in the sense that ordinary mortals do. The apparent premise of her lecture was that nobody had ever understood
Wuthering Heights
before she picked it up. I thought she was crazy. I was just reluctant to say so. To venture a few strictures about her husband's share of
Lectures in America
had already taken all the courage I could muster.

Though a few chips had appeared in his plinth by that stage, F. R. Leavis's prestige was still mighty, so it was quite standard procedure to screw up the tone of awe a notch or two when going against him. Also I retained, as I still retain, a high regard for some of his early work. But I had never thought him much of a judge of poetry. To my mind his praise of T. S. Eliot was decisively undermined by his often-stated conviction that Ronald Bottrall was Eliot's successor, and I couldn't see the point of his insistence that Shelley was not Shakespeare: it wasn't as if anybody had asserted the contrary. On top of these particular misjudgements there was his pervasive indulgence in the language of calumny. Special venom was reserved for fellow critics who had arrived at his conclusions before he did. When he finally decided that Dickens was a great writer, he took particular care to vilify any other critics who had ever said so: they hadn't been right in the right way. He treated D. H. Lawrence the way the scholiasts had once treated Virgil, as a voodoo talisman. I already thought that there were totalitarian tendencies in all this but had not yet found the nerve to say so: hence the strained tone, of respect trying to conceal repulsion. When I called his view of history “enormously complicated,” the “enormously” was the tip-off. I not only didn't really believe it, I thought his view of history was the opposite of complicated—i.e., actively simplistic and misleading. But I didn't yet dare to say what I thought, partly because not enough people seemed to be thinking it. Later on, with the back-up provided by having absorbed the life's work of real historians such as Pieter Geyl and Golo Mann, I found the moxie to declare, instead of just hint, that Leavis's historiographic rigmarole was a religious dogma in disguise.

The Metropolitan Critic
, 1994

28

A WHOLE GANG OF NOISE:
SUSAN SONTAG

Despite the relative civility with which
Against Interpretation
was greeted, Susan Sontag's reputation in this country has never really recovered from her first disastrous appearance with Jonathan Miller in an episode of
Monitor
which could have been called “Captain Eclectic and Thinkwoman Meet Public Ridicule.” The medium was the massacre: scarcely anybody came out of the programme with prestige intact and Miss Sontag was immediately incorporated into the British intelligentsia's typology of dreadful examples. Her appearances in print—a less damaging medium revealing neither her self-assurance rivalling Ethel Merman's nor her nonstop ponderosity which rendered even Miller unable to get a word in edgeways—have by now done something to correct this bad impression. In fact some of the home guard one might normally expect to be more careful when handling imported brainpower have started to overcorrect. “She has all the qualities of an excellent critic,” avers A. Alvarez in an unwise statement which the publishers are now employing on the jacket of
Styles of Radical Will
: “she is intelligent, perceptive, and impressively well informed.” Can't agree. She certainly possesses the qualities named, but conspicuously lacks the one quality every critic must have and an excellent critic must have in abundance: the capacity not to be carried away by a big idea.

Except for the two political essays in the book, one of them being the truly superlative “Trip to Hanoi,” her work is customarily marked by the use of a half-argued, hugely magnetic central notion which attracts examples to its surface so quickly and in such quantity that its outlines are immediately obscured. Sainte-Beuve once said that Montaigne sounds like one continuous epigram but Miss Sontag, like Harold Rosenberg most of the time and Hugh Kenner all the time, sounds like one continuous aphorism. The opportunity to stop the flow and ponder is rarely offered. When it is, usually by an overglib employment of a “thus” or a “nothing less,” the results yielded by a good hard think are seldom happy. Her long essay on pornography, for example, is an impressive against-interpretation job of getting facts in and prejudices out, but even in this field, where she seems to have read absolutely everything, the urge to generalize blocks the way of ordinary observation: you need only have read Restif de la Bretonne, let alone the modern pornographers, to realize that her statements about the use of speech in pornography are wide of the mark. Similarly in her essay on Godard it's the little things that bring on the big objections and the eventual wondering whether the thesis really is a thesis. She briefly notes that Godard's handling of torture scenes is pretty sketchy. Card-carrying Godard fans have long since realized that they must defend him at this point or lose all:
they
say that the master's imagination is so exquisite he can't sully it by trying to represent (or
redeem
, to employ the dusty vocabulary of Kracauer which Miss Sontag puts herself on record as admiring) reality in such things. But Miss Sontag doesn't feel bound to defend him since what she is postponing is not interpretation but judgement.

Wherein lies the fallacy and this lady's besetting intellectual vice—because judgement is not some higher brain function you turn on after a set period of omnivorous data-gathering, it's a process which should be continuously operative and in the critic
is
continuously operative. Thus (there, now I'm doing it) her contention that Godard needs to be regarded in the totality of his films is easily countered by the contention that you will gain no wisdom from a fool's utterance by cancelling the rest of your appointments and listening to him all day.

Miss Sontag attempts to break free of the historical burden and ready herself for the new but her attempt, fulsomely documented and exhaustingly fluent, doesn't alter the fact that the historical burden is only burdensome
historically
: aesthetically the giants of the past are our contemporaries and must be competed with as if they were still around—we've changed, but we haven't changed as much as we
haven't
changed, and Miss Sontag unconsciously concedes this point by being vague about when Modern Man actually got started—i.e., stopped being the old kind. There is great play here with Hegel as the last of the religious philosophers: it appears that his materialistic component got picked up and carried forward but his spiritual component got neglected, which only goes to show that Miss Sontag hasn't made much headway with Italian idealism. None of her broad arguments about modern trends and currents of thought is very trustworthy and there is a tendency to identify the unholy American mess with a crisis in Western civilization, a notion which ought to be resisted. The best and only solid part of the book is “Trip to Hanoi” but it should quickly be added that you only have to write one thing as good as that to earn a name. Here for once her prose has grace, her argument clarity and her whole literary personality a human presence.

The Listener
, 1969

POSTSCRIPT

Susan Sontag deserved rather better than this: after all, it was she who wrote “Trip to Hanoi,” not I. But the really reprehensible thing I did then that I wouldn't have done later was to go along with the bad press she had received after her notorious
Monitor
appearance. It certainly was a deliciously absurd moment in television history when Ms. Sontag, or Miss Sontag as she then would have been called, turned up at Andy Warhol's celebrated Factory to interview him and spent half an hour of precious screen-time examining the aesthetic implications of his failure to keep the appointment. She might have discussed the moral implications with some profit—he had been vilely rude, and we all might have benefited from having had that pointed out. Jonathan Miller no doubt regretted later on, in less indulgent times, that he had helped his protégée to drop herself in it. The publicity that accrued stuck to her for years. But since all publicity is binding publicity, and television publicity is intensely so, the task of the critic is to help sort out the real person from the image that has trapped him, or in this case her.

The real Sontag was, and is, a very clever woman—and a brave one, as I found out much later when I met her in New York and heard her on the subject of Sarajevo, where she had taken considerable risks to stage
Waiting for Godot
in circumstances that even Samuel Beckett might have found too appropriately eschatological. If she was carried away by big ideas, at least she had the courage to speculate over a wide cultural range, and often to original effect. An enthusiasm for the collected cinematic works of Jean-Luc Godard looked less ludicrous at the time, when the later films had not yet arrived to sow irreversible suspicion even in his most unquestioning fans that the earlier films might have been trivial all along. The sceptical Alvarez wrote a Fontana Modern Masters booklet about Godard, and it was far less corrosive than Jonathan Miller's companion volume on Marshall McLuhan. “Can't agree” was an over-­colloquial, and hence under-spontaneous, way of saying “I can't agree.” Wouldn't do it now. Sontag's empirical acuteness would have shone more brightly for being less veiled in whirling conceptual fluff. She wrote the way Salome danced, but the head she wanted was yours. Her relentless intellectualism asked to be appreciated uncritically for its aesthetic impact, with the inevitable corollary that if you couldn't take it you left it alone. She had, however, more staying power than her impatient young critics gave her credit for, and when the time came her proclivity for treating any subject as grist to her mill made her an indispensable commentator on the disease that struck her but found it so hard to strike her down. Nowadays, when I re-read her early work, I can see that strength in embryo, waiting to be born and flourish. It is a commonplace that books have their histories. It is less commonly noticed that the people who write them have their histories too, so that you can't quite know why they are like that at the start until you see what they do later.

The Metropolitan Critic
, 1994