Memoirs of a Leavisite, by David Elllis – review

As the author of this wise, patient and delightful book wryly reminds us, Stephen Fry — who, of course, knows everything — has recently written F.R. Leavis off as a ‘sanctimonious prick’. The phrase is probably typical of the way that today’s literary intelligentsia caricatures this tragically lonely, embattled and complex figure. ‘Hairshirt paranoiac’ I’ve also encountered somewhere: it does the trick equally well.

Does any academic under the age of 50 now treat Leavis’s map of English literature, let alone his values and judgments, as pedagogically viable forces? Most probably not: his enterprise as critic, teacher and editor of Scrutiny is now strictly a matter for the historians (Christopher Hilliard’s authoritative English as a Vocation being a recent and distinguished study), leaving ideas such as the organic community, the Great Tradition and technologico-Benthamitism, once considered dangerously radical, mere shibboleths obscurely niched in the pantheon of academic delusions.

But for those who were taught by him at Cambridge and came under the spell of his piercing avian gaze, Leavis remains 35 years after his death a vivid and inescapable voice of intellectual conscience.