Leavis used his Mill Lane, Cambridge, lecture room in the ╒fifties like an ideological slit-trench. Often he would snap off single shots: ╥Milton is as mechanical as a bricklayer.╙ Sometimes he would throw hand grenades: ╥There╒s something wrong with T. S. Eliot down there (pointing towards his waist) ╤ or even lower.╙ Occasionally he would risk a full bayonet charge at the main critical enemy ╤ the mandarins, the Neoplatonists, anyone whose seriousness about the fertilising relation between literature and life seemed more dilettante than his.
When all the imaginary smoke and gunfire died away he was left standing ╤ a bald, touchingly slender man, worn down by his own putdowns, his invariably and defiantly open-shirted neck mottled with sunburn like a gipsy╒s hand. He was the Max Miller of the lecture circuit, a one-line virtuoso.
Those of us from the enemies╒ colleges who crept across no-man╒s-land on one morning every week to fraternise at his open, free tutorials at Downing College discovered that he had a truer secret weapon possessed by none of his great contemporaries ╤ an instinct for academic democracy.
He treated adolescents like Trevor Nunn, Simon Gray and John Cleese as equals or potential equals. That was not a fad or an immaturity in him; it grew from his belief that a healthy literature nourishes ╤ and is also nourished by ╤ the roots of a sane society and that the study of it through a ╥collaboration╙ between teachers, critics and citizens is an activity fit for grown men and women.
He encouraged his pupils to apply this yardstick not only to literature but to newspapers, television, advertisement hoardings, letters and common speech. He was ruthless in using it. He revered most of Shakespeare but, in tutorials, dismissed much of Othello and Antony and Cleopatra as an attempt to soup up emotion about the doings of great babies. In its time, it was heresy. Ten years later the interpretation surfaced through some indirect channel in Olivier╒s Othello, in a system of
subsidised theatre which is now staffed by many of Leavis╒s former pupils.
Perhaps the most telling counter-assault on him was by C. S. Lewis, who said that the use of subliminal code words like ╥maturity╙ and ╥relevance╙ smuggled in an entire value system that was never made explicit for scrutiny. Others accused him of being a crypto-Marxist. Leavis never replied, which was a pity, but then his weapons during his long career of humiliations in the Cambridge English faculty also included silence, internal exile and cunning. His most murderous and underestimated weapon was ridicule, which he deployed in lectures with the virtuosity of a music-hall star and with an insensitivity verging on paranoia. He once said of a decent and courageous contemporary whose gait was showing the strain of trying to work while suffering from a severe leg injury, ╥it╒s not the fashion in my family to go senile at 60.╙ How the ╒grads laughed.
He also alienated generations of pupils from the journalism of critics of integrity like Cyril Connolly and Philip Toynbee because he resented ╤ with only some justification ╤ the way they dominated the review pages. But any primary-school teacher who as a matter of course now pays sensitive attention to the speech and writing of children and of people outside school has Frank Leavis to thank for it, among others.
For all his spite and his congested prose style,
he was the most creative, serious and influential
literary critic since his Victorian model, Matthew Arnold. In later life, he wanted the Oxford professorship of poetry because Arnold once held it. To his grief W. H. Auden beat him in the election. Perhaps his personal tragedy was that he never got far enough outside Oxbridge backbiting to realise that a great cultural wine, as he was, never needs that kind of bush.
