Frank Raymond Leavis

 

Frank Raymond Leavis 

Frank Raymond Leavis (1895–1978) was the last of the pioneers who turned out to be the most influential figure in the twentieth century. He could be paralleled to none other than Dr. Johnson. Born in Cambridge, he was not recognized by the then academicians. He was a Jew. He participated in the First World War as a stretcher bearer when Britain fought against Germany. Even then he is said to have carried a copy of Milton’s poems. He returned to England after service in World War II to become a lecturer in English at Emmanuel College (1925) and later a fellow at Downing College (1936-52.) His career as a writer and critic commenced with the publication of Mass Civilization and Minority Culture (1930) denouncing mass culture. His Education and University got published in 1943 and his critical essays on writers of English fiction like D.H. Lawrence, Novelist in 1955 and later Anna Karenina and Other Essays in 1968. His English Literature in Our Time and the University appeared in 1969 and ‘Nor shall my Sword’: Discourses on Pluralism, Compassion and Social Hope in 1972.

As a person, he was known for his “stern, handsome, aquiline features, the open shirts, the frugal mode of life, the athleticism, the unflinching integrity, the gentlemanliness of manner ...” Steiner recalls with nostalgia his unceremonious appearance which had an intensity while leaving a lectern in a Cambridge Hall. He is still best remembered for his pursuit in reshaping the tenor and spirit of his time and refining the English sensibility. He married Q.D. Roth in 1929 and she came to be called Q.D. Leavis. His doctoral dissertation was on the relationship between journalism and literature. His wife’s was on popular fiction.

Scrutiny

F.R. Leavis started a journal called Scrutiny in 1932. It emerged out of the debates and institutional developments within the Cambridge English School in the twenties. It brought out the supreme value of great literature and also the necessity for evaluative literary criticism. Scrutiny discussed a wide range of art forms which include music and cinema highlighting the link between literary achievement and general cultural health. This journal with its many contributors undertook the job of saving civilization by stressing upon the moral value of literary study. The contributors were Q.D. Leavis, L.C. Knights, Boris Ford, Denys Thompson, and Welfred Mellers. Leavis who was the prominent contributor until 1953, felt that a true critic should perform the evangelical task of creating awareness of the debasement of the recent “culture and reveal the richness of the past.” In fact Scrutiny undertook the job of saving civilization.

Leavis was not for a theory of a poem or a self-contained aesthetic work divorced from society, culture and tradition. This journal committed itself to educate people in English departments, and teacher training colleges in England, in books and periodicals which were devoted to the teaching of English in schools. The journal, ‘The Use of English’ founded in 1949 was an off shoot of Scrutiny. Raymond Williams and Richard Hoggart carried the legacy of Leavisite criticism. Leavis had the gift of a true critic.

Leavis was careful in using the critical language with a curious exactness, not reducing it to a jargon. Like the great critics, Dr.Johnson, Lessing, Saint-Beuve and Belinskya, Leavis has survived in his own right as a critic for whom criticism is an act of pivotal social intelligence. He felt that only criticism can make literature do its job. None other than a critic could be a complete reader. If I. A. Richards felt that poetry can save mankind, Leavis elevated the role of criticism claiming that it can save us.

Beginning with his New Bearings in English Poetry (1933), and ending with The Living Principle (1975), Leavis carried on with intense concentration and commitment, his close textual analysis of which Revaluation (1963) was a fine example. Leavis is seen at his best in the 1930s and his Revaluation was conceived even when he wrote his first work. The essays in this collection were written as separate pieces though they were meant as part of a single book.

Leavis’ criticism of the critics throws light on his own view of what criticism should be. He feels that Dr. Johnson’s work is both alive and life giving. And Leavis is in no way dissimilar to Dr. Johnson. What Leavis has achieved is the remarkable feat of making criticism. He was of the firm conviction that only a critic can be an ideal reader. A critic in his encounter with the text is bound to do a revaluation. The critic refines his own response and thus enters into a dialogue. Without a fruitful dialogue the judgments are bound to be arbitrary impressions. Leavis’ conviction was that only in man’s capacity to respond to art, he exhibits the general fitness for humane existence and only a mind with some literary education is capable of assessing political and social matters, for any valuable judgment on human affairs requires a “literacy of feeling.” Any society which does not have a worthy literature and a parallel critical study of it is not fully alive. Leavis’ conception of literary criticism can be summed up as a “plea for a live, humane social order.