The New Criterion

I can’t see,” Sir Frank Kermode is quoted as saying on the back cover of The Gatekeeper, “how this book could fail to amuse.” In that case I will have to tell him. It can fail because, despite containing many genuinely funny, and some touching, moments, its lack of amiability becomes ultimately distasteful. Terry Eagleton’s progress from a poor working-class childhood in the north of England to a chair of English at Oxford is an admirable achievement, but the chip has never been dislodged from his shoulder. As a boy he was gatekeeper to a convent of Carmelite nuns, and the symbol of privileged access to an enclosed world governs the book; when Cambridge offers him an undergraduate place, the roles are reversed and “the gatekeeper had let me in.” Did membership of the elite give him a bad conscience? To the inevitable question, how a supposed radical could contentedly occupy an Oxford professorship for so long, he gives no answer. Instead he offers unwitting proof of his own observation that “Oxbridge colleges … have an infantilizing effect on their longer-term inmates, reducing them to a state of querulous narcissism.” Catholic by birth, Marxist by conversion, he has abandoned formal profession of both faiths as too idealistic. “What governs our lives for the most part,” he pronounces, “is the given, the habitual, the sheer inertia of history, circumstance, inheritance.” Yet the fatalism is uneasy, just as the attempts at “wit” in the manner of his hero, Oscar Wilde, are largely devoid of Wilde’s charity or tenderness. He specializes in the far-fetched simile, of which there are two or three to a page. Whether they are apt, or even entertaining, doesn’t seem to matter; the point is to keep producing them mechanically.

Eagleton grew up in Salford—a city abutting the northern borders of Manchester, in whose university he now teaches. As he points out, Salford, while grim, was not entirely devoid of cultural figures. The painter L. S. Lowry, the playwright Shelagh Delaney, the folk-singer Ewan MacColl, the novelist Walter Greenwood, the actor Albert Finney, the composer Peter Maxwell Davies, the film-maker Mike Leigh, all hail from there. Eagleton thinks the odds are against intellectuals in a working-class environment suspicious of ideas. Yet we learn from the recently published study by Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes (Yale, 2001), which looks set to become a classic, that MacColl, who by the age of fifteen had read Dante, Kant, Darwin, Gogol, and Dostoevsky among much else, experienced a struggle of conscience as a member of the Young Communist League, the Workers’ Theatre Movement, and a band called The Red Megaphones. The scripts and lyrics he was performing seemed patronizing: “I resented people who talked about us as ‘you people’ or ‘the workers.’ I felt reduced, as if my identity was being taken away.” The “endless sloganizing,” with its inhuman leveling tendency, troubled him. Eagleton writes trenchantly on his own time as a left-wing activist, observing the illogicality of revolutionary policies being propounded by people with impeccable middle-class credentials, the sheer unreality of fanaticism and dogma, the abundance of “purism, arrogance, overhastiness, tunnel vision” among the ideologues, yet can still insist that “Revolutionaries … are neither optimists nor pessimists, but realists”—which, he thinks, is why they are so few in number. It seems not to trouble him that literary theory, of which he has been a leading exponent, might be a variety of such “realism.” Jonathan Rose supplies page after page of haunting vignettes—millworkers listening to a lecture on the lieder of Hugo Wolf, the engineer with a passion for opera, drinkers in a back-street pub forming an audience for live singing of Offenbach. These socialists of an earlier generation make Eagleton’s political credentials look pretty shallow. Neville Cardus, a Manchester working-class boy, recorded pointedly that when he and his friends talked the night away it was “not to air our economic grievances, not to ‘spout’ politics and discontent, but to relieve the ferment of our minds or emotions after the impact of Man and Superman, Elektra, Riders to the Sea, Pelléas and Mélisande, Scheherazade, Prince Igor.”

The point about these people is that, without compromising their political beliefs, they understood that the major purpose of the arts is to sustain and nourish, to give vision and hope. There is little sign that Eagleton understands this. He is what he calls Sartre, “the media’s idea of an intellectual,” who has earned his living “peddling ideas to the masses.” The depth of his interest in those ideas, in the literature which explores them, or in the masses to whom he dispenses them, is hard to gauge. Almost all his references to his teaching, whether in England or America, contain sneers at the stupidity of his pupils. About his own teachers at Cambridge he is openly scornful and spiteful, permitting himself such phrases as “disgusting old misogynist … supremely trivial-minded,” “emotional desperado,” or “erudite brat.” He disdains their eccentricity, which he dismisses as “a fancy word for outrageous egotism.” Eventually there is a shriek of rage at these old-style dons: “Petulant, snobbish, spiteful, arrogant, autocratic and ferociously self-centred, they were a pretty squalid bunch.” Could it be that they refused to take him at his own valuation? Yet to some of them, at least, he owes his chances in life.

Other reviewers have found the “Dons” chapter hilarious. I find it disgusting. What gives Eagleton the right to this kind of tone? What are his claims to respect as a critic? A clutch of books on Marxism, ideology, cultural politics, and nineteenth-century Irish literary history is, after all, pretty small beer, some of it perilously near the bottom of the barrel. Worse, in promoting the abandonment of thought which constitutes literary theory, he has connived at the destruction of British higher education. Worst of all, one has the suspicion that he has done this as a kind of act, a malicious form of diversion. His half-dozen impressive pages here on Wittgenstein are in quite a different key, and show that he is no fool, although he remains, I feel, a clever schoolboy embarrassed by his own intelligence and perversely determined to misuse it to épater les bourgeois.

His account of his disagreement with his Cambridge supervisor over Tragedy (the topic of one of his final examination papers) reveals significant undercurrents in his personality. The don clung to the idea that Greek tragedy represented the acme of the genre and that Ibsen or Tennessee Williams, for instance, fell short of it. “Modern tragedy,” to him, was a contradiction in terms. Eagleton disagreed, as well he might. But what can he mean to imply by his next comment, “I thought tragedy was a bad thing, whereas he thought it was a good one”? Does Eagleton find no cogency in the argument that literary tragedy can legitimately give pleasure? Nobody denies that real-life tragedy is a bad thing—certainly not the don, as we see a few pages later, when it falls to him to break the news that Eagleton’s father has died during his son’s absence in Cambridge to sit the scholarship examination. Further, the don “also assumed that tragedy was always a deeper affair than comedy.” Is that not too neat an antithesis? Whose comedy is more heart-breaking than Beckett’s, for instance?

There are reasons for Eagleton’s discomfort. Despite having failed to gain a scholarship, he was offered an undergraduate place. Compassion was not a motive, he insists: his supervisor was a man of strict probity. Yet his gratitude was mingled with resentment: “His world was the Law which had brought my father to his ruin, but it was a Law which my father was asking me to love.” This refers back to some earlier remarks on tragedy and the unattractiveness, as Eagleton sees it, of the concept of the sacrificial victim. His father, who had had to forgo a place at grammar school because his family could not afford the fees, was a scapegoat: “he sacrificed himself for his children, but that made him precisely not a model to emulate.” His inarticulacy made him remote and enigmatic; his terror of emotional display made him hard and apparently unloving. Yet Eagleton, who admits to excessive fluency and is certainly not shy of expressing, if not emotions, at least feelings, is sure that his father loved him. His academic success has been an act both of reparation and of revenge. That, perhaps, helps to explain the peculiar combination of wistfulness and vindictiveness in his tone, particularly when he comes to write of male authority figures. It makes for an unsettling book, which deserves a subtler reaction than the amusement of Professor Kermode.