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Book
ReviewEagleton's
Delicious Sketches and His Anglo-Saxon AttitudeThe gatekeeper. Terry Eagleton, 2001.
London: Penguin; ISBN 0141005920, vii + 178 pp., £6.99, paper
SAGE Publications, Inc.200610.1191/0967550706ab038XX
GillEvans
University of Cambridge
`Most
literary biographies deal with the material infrastructure of writing ...
rather than with the thing itself. It is like an account of Versailles that
focuses mainly on the plumbing', complains Terry Eagleton in a review in the
Times Higher Education Supplement (18 March 2005). There is lots of `plumbing'
in this profoundly English book. In this narrative, the personalities obscure
the politics. Brecht, for example, is portrayed as a `Marxist maverick', whose
always ready-packed suitcase accompanied a man who kept his outside safe and
his revolutionary thoughts to himself. Its in-jokes are for those who grew
up in the world it describes. In parti- cular, any academic whose career has
spanned roughly the same decades and been spent largely at the teddy-bear's
picnic of Oxbridge is likely to feel at home. I recall an undergraduate life
at Oxford, in the days before colleges were mixed, when today's `access' questions
had not even been thought of. Such murmurings as there were concerned the
inequities of admitting one girl for every ten boys, but most of those from
working-class back- grounds such as mine had had a top-class education free
at a grammar or direct grant school and had no tuition fees to pay as students.
There were grants on which it was realistic to live and the great divide among
the girls, as I remember it, was between those who had been to boarding schools
and were used to living away from home and those who were simply homesick.
The social confidence or the lack of it divided both sexes, and the most striking
comparison with the lot of the new student today (apart from the problem of
student debt) is probably the quite different kinds of street and other `cred'
which imbue the modern eighteen-year old with a sense of savoir faire. After
some years of teaching in a school and in two red-brick universities, the
main decades of my own professional life have been spent in Cambridge, watching
it evolve from the world Eagleton describes, which embedded itself deep into
the memories and emotional `take' on life of the generation of academics that
is moving towards retirement now. Young and green, I experienced the mixing
of colleges not as a student but
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as a
college fellow. It was uncomfortable for the women at first, for they did
not know quite what to do with us. But we were the one in ten and, by and
large, we could cope. The old idea was that everyone had a vote, one for the
vice chancellor and one for the youngest college fellow or lecturer. Individuals
put their names to `Memorials' or other calls for action or resistance in
the best Cornford traditions, and there was much plotting and counter-plotting
in the corners of Combination Rooms or in the open air of King's Parade or
the Broad, where the point was to be seen by chance in conversation by those
of other factions. I learned on my pulses the ground rules of Cornford's Microcosmographia
Academica, for that elegant little study of 1908 remains the last word on
the politics. Oxford and Cambridge are still run as Athenian democracies,
with a heavy admixture of the spirit of the cathedral chapter. C.P. Snow's
novels of the mid-twentieth century are scarcely dated at all at the level
of power play and plotting the overthrow of colleagues. New on the scene,
but largely left out by Eagleton, is the effect of the attempted introduction
of modern management practices into universities, even Oxford and Cambridge.
Both modern universities are increasingly commercially oriented and spin-ridden.
Old academe, peopled by such eccentric figures as Eagleton sketches, and others,
including myself, whose battles with the `system' shape them into oddities,
is being overlaid by a new academe where the power is in the hands of smooth
managerial types who do not read or write books much; below them, the young
scholar on a temporary contract on soft money, perhaps from a big corporation,
is impotent to resist these trends if he or she hopes to have a continuing
career. There has been a shifting of tectonic plates as collegiality is overlaid
by line management and the old `civil service' ethos among administrators
of universities is replaced by the attitudes inculcated by the MBA on offer
from the Judge Institute of Management and the Said Business School. I have
seen in a quarter of a century of professional academic life in one of the
ancient universities and more decades still in intimate observation of the
other, how that democratic freedom is being eroded by the arrival of this
new kind of plumbing. Matters of principle became matters of expediency. Colleagues
become nervous of letting their names appear. A few years ago, one Cambridge
Head of Department placed a note repressively on top of a petition which had
been left in a common room for signature. He forbade anyone to sign it. Perhaps
the most dramatic recent episode of this kind occurred in May 2005, when some
of `Oxford's finest', dedicated teachers of generations of students, received
letters criticizing them for failing to produce enough of the kind of research
required if Oxford was to earn the maximum points and the maximum state funding
in the forthcoming national Research Assessment Exercise; or if they were
doing the right thing, they were told
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that
they were not doing it rapidly enough. They were informed that this failure
on their part could become a disciplinary offence and that they might be sacked
for non-compliance with the requirements of the management. There was outrage,
a debate and a public vote in which 600 took part, and the management was,
for the time being, routed. However, these things have their after-effects,
and the confidence in their own ways, which characterizes the eccentrics of
Eagleton's story and makes some of them remarkable, is in danger of being
eroded. This takes us close to what is wrong with this book, as well as what
is right with it. The method is to use `exempla', anecdotes and `characters'
to make points in verbal pictures. Substructures, themes and theories are
alluded to in passing and the reader (laughing out loud) may miss them. There
is plenty of caricature and exaggeration, designed to sharpen the insights
pointed to. The New York MA class of modern nuns that Eagleton once taught
`could sense the Holy Spirit stirring in a corkscrew or a bag of chips' and
led a modernized and extrovert version of the profoundly erotic life of the
medieval mystic. `They murmured slogans to each other like ... “He's
coming, He's coming!”, which [Eagleton] took to be eschatological rather
than erotic, and gave each other ham-fisted versions of the Black Power salute.'
This makes for a vastly entertaining read but it cheats the reader of the
balanced self-assessment which is required of a full autobiography. The organizing
principle of the book is thematic rather than chrono- logical, in keeping
with its episodic structure. Nevertheless, a unifying thread of instructions
on religion, sex, politics and power runs grippingly throughout for the reader
who is looking out for it. The first chapter (`Lifers') is given to members
of the priesthood and the religious orders in the Roman Catholic Church, whose
exaggerated eccentricities energe- tically embrace an ability to reconcile
the contradictions in their lives and to accommodate various `spiritual backfirings'.
The second chapter, on `Catholics', tackles the machinery of Roman Catholic
doctrine and the way it is imparted to the `cradle Catholic', until he grows
up `lacking all instinctive feel for the liberal sensibility', while finding
it relatively easy to move between extreme positions. `The path from the Tridentine
Creed to Trotskyism is shorter than it seems.' The title of the third chapter
is `Thinkers', but it begins with money. It moves on smartly, via the hypothesis
that those brought up in a financially underprivileged scene may overcome
their early disadvantages by over- compensating, to Eagleton's own `problem'
that he cannot stop writing. This has made him `overproductive' among `normal,
psychically blocked, unproductive academics'. He considers a series of notables,
including Wittgenstein (who disliked Cambridge as much as Eagleton did), in
the context of the misfit who finds himself by trying too hard, but never
quite belongs. He moves on to `Politicos', still pursuing the theme of class
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difference
and its consequences in the life of those who move from one fully featured
world to another, as he finds he himself did in the numerous ways which provide
him with his chapter headings. `Losers' follow, those who dwell in the working-class
world. In this chapter, the tension for Eagleton is between utility in its
modern and its nineteenth-century sense; and the focusing question is where
an aesthetic is to be found. His chapter on `Dons' will be meat to those still
bent on making Oxbridge out to be elitist, for in his undergraduate days it
was. He captures mercilessly the life of privilege and leisure then led by
many academics, for whom the college wine committee might indeed be a higher
priority than writing (for publication was thought to be in slightly bad taste).
`The traditional don was an amphibious animal, moving between Mayfair party
and ivory tower rather like a monk untrue to his vows.' He moves on to his
own early years as an academic and gives us the other side of the tutorial
or supervision, selecting his literary victims from among the `upper-class
twits' who appeared before him, mannered, with their essays. Eagleton's Cambridge
is a not a great distance from Porterhouse Blue. The problem is that there
are aspects of the place which are indeed like that. The egregious Dr Greenway,
formerly philosopher and lawyer, but for Eagleton an English don, is an authentic
Cambridge character. It is a university which remains nervous of ideas and
Greenway's encyclopaedic culture left him, Eagleton says, `not only bereft
of ideas but passionately opposed to them'. `He was as allergic to ideas as
a wrestler or a stockbroker.' Greenway would speculate in supervisions with
Eagleton about leaving Cambridge, but in the tones of one who knew it was
`utterly absurd or logically impossible, like taking a day-trip to Saturn
or sprouting a pair of antlers.' `Oxbridge colleges ... have an infantilising
effect on their longer-term inmates.' Very possibly, but it is rash for an
author who is also an academic to say so in a survey of his own life. Nevertheless,
it is all there in the story of Greenway sitting at the feet of Wittgenstein,
the admiring of intellectual greatness in one's colleagues while resenting
the implication that one's own academic status may be lower; the loyalties
stronger than those to any football team which may be felt for a college (though
never, I think, for a faculty or department); the nervous withdrawals at the
slightest slapping of a wrist. Academe has its heroes, who are alternately
adored and resented by their colleagues, sometimes on the same day. In `Aristos',
the final chapter, Eagleton confronts his demons most frankly. They are the
malign spirits of class warfare, for he still thinks of himself as not of
the upper classes, despite having moved securely in among at least their lower
reaches. There is lively writing here, as one would expect. The book is full
of the unexpected, the paradoxical turn of the sentence which keeps the reader
turning pages not only to find out
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what
happens next, but also, with a critic's puzzlement, in an effort to `place'
the genre. The book is described as a `memoir'; a positively Chaucerian moral-tale-with-social-commentary
results. The delicious sketches are fuller of implications than they seem
and repay return visits, but the central character is never quite in full
view. He remains observer and not observed. Eagleton is rightly confident
that his readers will be so enchanted by his stories that they will not gaze
too hard at the Anglo- Saxon attitudes being struck by the narrator himself.