F. R. Leavis

Frank Raymond Leavis CH (July 14, 1895 - April 14, 1978) was an influential British literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught and studied for nearly his entire life at Downing College, Cambridge.

Early life

Frank Raymond Leavis was born in Cambridge, England, on the 14th of July 1895; about a decade after T. S. Eliot, James Joyce, D. H. Lawrence and Ezra Pound, literary figures whose reputations he would later be responsible for elevating. His father Harry Leavis, a cultured man, operated a small shop in Cambridge which sold pianos and other musical instruments (Hayman 1), and his son was to retain a respect for him throughout his life. Frank Leavis was educated at a local independent private school, The Perse School, whose headmaster at the time was Dr. W. H. D. Rouse. Rouse was a classicist and known for his ‘direct method’, a practice which required teachers to carry on classroom conversations with their pupils in Latin and classical Greek. Though he enjoyed languages to a certain extent, Leavis felt that his native language was the only one on which he was able to speak with authority, thus his reading in the classical languages is not particularly evident in his critical publications (Bell 3).

Leavis was nineteen when Britain declared war on Germany in 1914. Not wanting to kill, he took a position as a stretcher-bearer, working with the Friends Ambulance Unit and carrying a copy of Milton’s poems with him as he worked at the front. His experience at the front was to have a lasting effect on Leavis; mentally he was prone to insomnia and suffered from intermittent nightmares, but exposure to gas permanently damaged his physical health, primarily his digestive system.

Leavis was slow to recover from the war, and he was later to refer to it as ‘the great hiatus’. He had won a scholarship from the Perse School to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, and in 1919 began to read for a degree in History. In his second year he changed to English and became a pupil at the newly founded English School at Cambridge. Despite graduating with first-class Honours Leavis was not seen as a strong candidate for a research fellowship, and instead embarked on a PhD, a lowly career move for an aspiring academic in those days. In 1924 Leavis presented a thesis on ‘The Relationship of Journalism to Literature' [which] studied the rise and earlier development of the press in England’ (Bell 4). This work was to contribute to his lifelong concern with the way in which the ethos of a periodical can both reflect and mould the cultural aspirations of a wider public (Greenwood 8). In 1927 Leavis was appointed as a probationary lecturer for the university, and when his first substantial publications began to appear a few years later, their style was very much influenced by the demands of teaching.

Later life and career

In 1929 Leavis married one of his students, Queenie Roth, and this union resulted in a productive collaboration which yielded many great critical works culminating with their annus mirabilis in 1932 when Leavis published New Bearings in English Poetry, his wife published Fiction and the Reading Public, and the quarterly periodical Scrutiny was founded (Greenwood 9). A small publishing house, The Minority Press, was founded by Gordon Fraser, another of Leavis' students, in 1930, and served for several years as an additional outlet for the work of Leavis' and some of his students. Also in this year Leavis was appointed director of studies in English at Downing College where he was to teach for the next thirty years. Leavis remained the chief editor of Scrutiny until 1953. During this time he used it as a vehicle for the new Cambridge criticism, upholding rigorous intellectual standards and attacking the dilettante elitism which he believed to characterize the Bloomsbury Group. Scrutiny provided a forum for identifying important contemporary work and for reviewing the traditional canon by comparably serious criteria (Bell 6). This criticism was informed by a teacher’s concern to present the essential to students, taking into consideration time constraints and a limited range of experience.

New Bearings in English Poetry was the first major volume of criticism Leavis was to publish, and it provides insight into his own critical positions. Leavis has been frequently (but often erroneously) associated with the American school of New Critics, a group which advocated close reading and detailed textual analysis of poetry over an interest in the mind and personality of the poet, sources, the history of ideas and political and social implications. Although there are undoubtly similarities between Leavis's approach to criticism and that of the New Critics (most particularly in that both take the work of art itself as the primary focus of critical discussion), Leavis is ultimately distinguishable from them, since he never adopted (and was explicitly hostile to) a theory of the poem as a self-contained and self-sufficient aesthetic and formal artefact, isolated from the society, culture and tradition from which it emerged. New Bearings, devoted principally to Gerard Manley Hopkins, William Butler Yeats, George Eliot and Ezra Pound, was an attempt to identify the essential new achievements in modern poetry (Bell 6). It also discussed at length and praised the work of Ronald Bottrall, whose importance was not to be confirmed by readers and critics.

In 1933 Leavis published For Continuity, which was a selection of Scrutiny essays. This publication, along with Culture and the Environment (a joint effort with Denys Thompson), stressed the importance of an informed and discriminating, highly-trained intellectual elite whose existence within university English departments would help preserve the cultural continuity of English life and literature. In Education and the University (1943), Leavis argued that ‘there is a prior cultural achievement of language; language is not a detachable instrument of thought and communication. It is the historical embodiment of its community’s assumptions and aspirations at levels which are so subliminal much of the time that language is their only index’ (Bell 9).

In 1948, Leavis focused his attention on fiction and made his general statement about the English novel in The Great Tradition where he traced this tradition through Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, and Joseph Conrad. Leavis purposely excluded major authors such as Laurence Sterne and Thomas Hardy, but eventually changed his position on Charles Dickens, publishing Dickens the Novelist in 1970.

In 1950, in the introduction to Mill on Bentham and Coleridge, a publication he edited, Leavis set out the historical importance of utilitarian thought. Leavis found Bentham to epitomize the scientific drift of culture and social thinking, which was in his view the enemy of the holistic, humane understanding he championed (Bell 9).

1952 saw the publication of another collection of essays from Scrutiny: The Common Pursuit. Outside of his work on English poetry and the novel, this is Leavis’s best-known and most influential work. A decade later Leavis was to earn much notoriety when he delivered his Richmond lecture, Two cultures? The significance of C. P. Snow at Downing College. Leavis vigorously attacked Snow's suggestion, from a 1959 lecture and book by C. P. Snow (see The Two Cultures), that practitioners of the scientific and humanistic disciplines should have some significant understanding of each other, and that a lack of knowledge of twentieth-century physics was comparable to an ignorance of Shakespeare (Bell 10). Leavis's ad hominem attacks on Snow's intelligence and abilities were widely decried in the British press by public figures such as Lord Boothby and Lionel Trilling (Kimball)[1]. Leavis introduced the idea of the 'third realm' as a name for the method of existence of literature; works which are not private like a dream or public in the sense of something that can be tripped over, but exist in human minds as a work of collaborative re-constitution (Greenwood 11).

In 1962 his readership and fellowship at Downing were terminated; however, he took up Visiting Professorships at the University of Bristol, the University of Wales and the University of York. His final volumes of criticism were Nor Shall My Sword (1972), The Living Principle (1975) and Thought, Words and Creativity (1976). These later works are generally accepted as the weaker part of his canon, his best cultural criticism having shown itself in the form of his literary critical practices.

Leavis died at the age of eighty-two on the 14th of April 1978 having been made a Companion of Honour in the New Year. His wife Q. D. Leavis died in 1981.

Criticism

Leavis in his writing was one of the most influential figures in twentieth-century English literary criticism. He introduced a ‘seriousness’ into English studies, and the modern university subject has been shaped very much by Leavis’s example. Leavis possessed a very clear idea of literary criticism and he was well known for his decisive and often provocative judgements. Leavis insisted that evaluation was the principal concern of criticism, and that it must ensure that English literature should be a living reality operating as an informing spirit in society, and that criticism should involve the shaping of contemporary sensibility (Bilan 61).

Leavis’s criticism is difficult to directly classify, but it can be grouped into four chronological stages. The first is that of his early publications and essays including New Bearings in English Poetry (1932) and Revaluation (1936). Here he was concerned primarily with reexamining poetry from the seventeenth to twentieth centuries, and this was accomplished under the strong influence of T. S. Eliot. Also during this early period Leavis sketched out his views about university education.

He then turned his attention to fiction and the novel, producing The Great Tradition (1948) and D. H. Lawrence, Novelist (1955). Following this period Leavis pursued an increasingly complex treatment of literary, educational and social issues. Though the hub of his work remained literature, his perspective for commentary was noticeably broadening, and this was most visible in Nor Shall my Sword (1972).

Two of his last publications embodied the critical sentiments of his final years; The Living Principle: ‘English’ as a Discipline of Thought (1975), and Thought, Words and Creativity: Art and Thought in Lawrence (1976). Although these later works have been sometimes called "philosophy", there is no abstract or theoretical context to justify such a description. In discussing the nature of language and value, Leavis implicitly treats the sceptical questioning that philosophical reflection starts from as an irrelevance from his standpoint as a literary critic - a position set out in his famous early exchange with Rene Wellek (Stotesbury)[2].

Criticism of poetry

Though his achievements as a critic of poetry were impressive, Leavis is widely accepted to have been a better critic of fiction and the novel than of poetry. Much of this is due to the fact that a large portion of what he had to say about poetry was being said by others around him at the time. Nonetheless, in New Bearings in English Poetry Leavis attacked the Victorian poetical ideal, suggesting that nineteenth-century poetry sought the consciously ‘poetical’ and showed a separation of thought and feeling and a divorce from the real world. The influence of T. S. Eliot is easily identifiable in his criticism of Victorian poetry, and Leavis acknowledged this, saying in The Common Pursuit that, ‘It was Mr. Eliot who made us fully conscious of the weakness of that tradition’ (Leavis 31). In his later publication Revaluation, the dependence on Eliot was still very much present, but Leavis demonstrated an individual critical sense operating in such a way as to place him among the distinguished modern critics.

The early reception of T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound's poetry, and also the reading of Gerard Manley Hopkins, were considerably enhanced by Leavis's proclamation of their greatness. His dislike of John Milton, on the other hand, had no great impact on Milton's popular esteem.

Criticism of the novel

As a critic of the novel, Leavis’s main tenet stated that great novelists show an intense moral interest in life, and that this moral interest determines the nature of their form in fiction (Bilan 115). Authors within this tradition were all characterised by a serious or responsible attitude to the moral complexity of life and included Jane Austen, George Eliot, Henry James, Joseph Conrad, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Charles Dickens, and D. H. Lawrence. In The Great Tradition Leavis attempted to set out his conception of the proper relation between form/composition and moral interest/art and life. This proved to be a contentious issue in the critical world, as Leavis refused to separate art from life, or the aesthetic or formal from the moral. He insisted that the great novelist’s preoccupation with form was a matter of responsibility towards a rich moral interest, and that works of art with a limited formal concern would always be of lesser quality.

References

Bell, Michael, F. R. Leavis (1988)

Bilan, R. P.. The Literary Criticism of F. R. Leavis (1979)

Greenwood, Edward, F. R. Leavis, Longman Group: London, (1978)

Leavis, F. R., The Common Pursuit, Chatto & Windus: London; Clarke, Irwin: Toronto, 1952.

Kimball, Roger, "The Two Cultures Today", in The New Criterion, Vol. 12, No. 6, February 1994.

Stotesbury, Richard, "Theory", Philosophy and F. R. Leavis, in Words in Edgeways 18-19, October 2006 & January 2007