Terry Eagleton: the gatekeeper
Terry Eagleton, was in Cairo this week, giving three lectures -- two at the American University in Cairo (AUC) and one at the opening of Cairo University's English Department International Symposium on Comparative Literature (4-6 Nov.). The first two AUC lectures on Saturday and Monday were entitled Tragedy and Terror , and The Death of Criticism respectively, while in Cairo University Eagleton's keynote address dealt with Culture and Identity .
Terry Eagleton was described last year by the London daily The Independent as "the man who succeeded F R Leavis as Britain's most influential academic critic." A more apt tribute to Eagelton, perhaps, would be to point to his close affinity with Raymond Williams, his professor and mentor at Cambridge. Until he went to study at Cambridge in the early 1960s, Eagleton was a practicing Catholic under the influence of the radical Dominican Friar Laurence Bright. At Cambridge he met Williams "the other man who influenced me most at the time," as Eagleton wrote in his facinating autobiography The Gatekeeper. Below we publish excerpts from Eagleton's book in which he talks about the two men who influenced most his formative years.
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"... He [Laurence Bright] was a connoisseur of small absurdities, and would pounce on them with the delighted yelp of a botanist discovering a rare species of plant. He had something of a camp, suavely malicious manner, though its origin -- if the two could be distinguished in those days -- was less queerness than the quadrangle, and he would lounge sardonically down a snow- bound street wearing only a shabby clerical suit and his trademark, surreally long blue scarf. The suit was too short in the sleeves, so that there was a touch of an overgrown Dickensian orphan about him. He looked like a cross between an Edwardian roue and Dr Who, and how he had washed up as a friar seemed only slightly less of an enigma than cosmic wormholes or the Bermuda triangle.
"He had, in fact, started out as a card-carrying agnostic. He had been a nuclear physicist at Oxford, and at the time was evidently well to the right of the Tory Party. But at some point he became an Anglican, perhaps, so some speculated, in reaction to some of the military uses of his scientific work. He was, in effect, working on the atomic bomb. Then, somehow, he drifted from high-Tory Anglicanism into the Catholic Church and left-wing politics. This was perhaps partly because of his relentless intellectual clear-sightedness: once he had persuaded himself that capitalism was morally disreputable, he put his unsavoury past behind him with characteristic briskness and never looked back. But there was also, despite his air of a spiritual flaneur, a strain of going the whole hog about him, which might help to explain some of these otherwise eccentric shifts of allegiance. Roman Catholicism was a kind of logical step from Anglicanism, and getting himself ordained rather than just cheering from the back pews was another such pushing of the matter to its inexorable limit.
"Something of the same aversion to the middle ground maybe accounted for his curious trek from far right to far left, though this had its logic too. In a sense, he transferred his Wildean disdain for the suburban masses from elitist contempt to revolutionary politics, as indeed did Wilde himself. Being a radical socialist simply supplied Laurence with a whole new set of reasons to find the middle classes irresistibly amusing. Patrician hauteur could thus be converted into radical courage ...
"Laurence may have been an oddball on the left, but he was nonetheless granted the accolade of the other man who influenced me most at the time, Raymond Williams. Williams met him briefly, and commented to me later that he was 'a real man'. Since Williams was reluctant to concede reality to most of the people he encountered in Cambridge, this was a genuine compliment. Like myself, Williams felt ill-at-ease with the flamboyant semiotics of English upper- class life. Indeed, the fact that he did depressed me, since I hoped that by the time I reached his age I might have outgrown the impulse to smash in the face anyone who brayed rather than spoke in restaurants, sported a cravat or said 'rarely' when they meant 'really', and Williams was ominous evidence that I might not. But he was shrewd enough to see through Laurence's Mertonian mincings to the unswerving commitment beneath. He could see that he belonged with the class of foppish secret agent who fusses over his brand of mustard but could kill you with a matchbox. Certainly Laurence could give people a nasty knee-jerk in the ideology while seeming only to pass the time of day, from which it would take them weeks to recover.
"Anyway, Williams himself knew all about the crossing of class signals. He was a source of perpetual faint bemusement to his Cambridge colleagues, since though he clearly had a world-class mind he also wore his hair at collar-length, rolled his 'r's' like a Cornishman, wore roll-neck sweaters and looked more like a farmer than a don. He had the wrong voice for his placidly authoritative air, and the wrong face for his superbly unruffled poise. His very presence deranged the conventional categories, and his fellow dons gathered inquisitively round him like zoologists around a dolphin whose low droning might just be a recitation of the Iliad.
"Despite his mildly raffish air, Laurence lived a threadbare, hand-to-mouth sort of existence. He had no real function within the Dominican order, but this meant that he could live the on- the-hoof life of a friar to the full. As a cross between Oscar Wilde and a footloose cleric, he made himself up as he went along, sauntering from pray-in to anti-war demo in a scintillating piece of self-improvisation. His upper-class grit allowed him to live without anchorage or nostalgia. Though he seemed extraordinarily self- sufficient, he must surely have been lonely, but he remained suitably stiff-lipped about it...
[...]
"It was at Laurence's suggestion that a group of us, mostly Catholic undergraduates at Cambridge, launched a left-wing Catholic journal called Slant, which ran throughout most of the 60s and caused something of a fluttering in the cloisters. The name of the journal, indeed the very same design, was finally adopted by a porno magazine, which Laurence spotted one day in a Soho shop-window and gleefully circulated to the former editors. Nowadays people write the odd doctoral thesis on the Catholic left, which I suppose is one up from oblivion. But it was Laurence Bright who finally liberated me from my stiff-necked papist correctness. I was a socialist, to be sure, but I was anxious to know how far to the left a Catholic could go without falling off the edge. So I asked Laurence, who replied with a coo and a cavalier gesture, 'Oh, as left as you like.' It seemed there was no edge after all. The New Testament's answer to David Lodge's question 'How far can you go?' is, of course, never far enough. And only a Catholic would think it was about sex.
"Laurence died of stomach cancer while still fairly young. He died in his brave, brisk, thoroughly commonsensical way. Not long before his death he visited me in Oxford with his partner, an accomplished organist. I watched him standing by himself in the college chapel as she played one of his favourite organ pieces for him, head bowed, shoulders hunched, still in his tattered clerical suit despite his errancy, looking as usual like an elongated question- mark. He knew he was dying, though I did not. He shall always stand like that, listening with head bowed, in my mind."
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