Book Review

by

Andrew Harold Morton

Penguin Books 2002

by

Terry Eagelton
 

When I was in the sixth form in 1967, I was taught by an exact contemporary of Terry Eagleton straight out of Cambridge. Sonny Boy (Williams) or sometimes Junkie Bill because of his pallid complexion and the bags under his eyes, certainly spiced up whole process of literary criticism by introducing us to Marxist theory, recommending to us the impossibly obscure Catholic Marxist magazine Slant and leaving us with an irrational fear of "liberal humanism". Apparently, the world of English was on a fast track to a brave new world announced by Richard Hoggart, Raymond Williams and a host of feisty younger dudes like Perry Anderson and Terry Eagleton. The jargon was great, the excursions into philosophy and history stimulating, as was the opportunity to dip into Utilitarian and Marxist theory.

There was something Messianic about Sonny's teaching, and I still feel grateful to have been on the receiving end. It was a symptom of an new direction that was taking hold of the discipline of English at that time, fuelled by leftist commentators like Raymond Williams, and a whole generation of working class and lower middle class baby-boomers who had risen through the grammar school system with a new egalitarian social agenda.

So how does Britain's most eminent Marxist critic and literary theorist go about organising his experiences? In his use of "memoir" genre, Eagleton is consciously eschewing the conventional autobiographical narrative, with all its attendant fallacies, and adopting a thematic approach organised around various influential groups of people--"Catholics", "Dons", Philosophers" etc. This leaves him free to treat life more as we experience it--a degree of narrative, yes, but also a mass of anecdote and philosophical speculation. This approach is akin to some of Orwell's writing and books like Richard Hoggart's The Uses of Literacy or Raymond Williams' Culture and Society, although there is little that is portentous about Eagleton's memoir, which lopes amiably and ironically over similar territory but centres itself firmly in his own life.

Refreshing is his talent for humour, which deserves to bring this book at least to the attention of an audience acquainted with his previous works like Literary Theory (1983) or his novel Saints and Scholars. Indeed, one might be sceptical about Penguin's confidence that there is an audience out there for this kind of book, but if you add up all the English teachers in schools and universities around the world, you come to an impressive total. Literary Theory is big business, and has been for at least twenty years. It probably compares favourably with other pursuits like yachting or yoga, although nowhere in the league of gardening, home-improvements or cooking.

The content of The Gatekeeper swarms around the reader somewhat anarchically, and it would be hard to do justice to it all because of a rather loose, anecdotal method. There are many good gags (not all of them original) but there are also moments of genuine pathos --his last sighting of Laurence Bright as he stands "like an elongated question mark" in his tattered clerical suit listening to his wife playing a favourite tune on the organ, for example. Broadly, though, three themes underpin the narrative: his dire working class childhood, Catholicism and Cambridge.

The cynic might claim that the childhood bit is fairly well trodden territory, which can easily become mawkish, as in Frank McCourt's emotionally importunate Angela's Ashes. In the wrong hands, it can turn into a mere tool to extort an emotional response from the reader, or for evoking a kind of grim anti-nostalgia in the Pythonesque "We would have been glad of a shoebox" vein. There are times, indeed, when Eagleton hovers on the brink of this kind of thing in sentences like:" We were the only family in our street to have a bath, although it was too rusty to use." On the whole, though, there is a fitting rational for all this material, which is to endorse his credentials as a working class boy who took on the literary establishment and won. There is an element of "Jack and the Beanstalk" in the Eagleton persona, underlined perhaps, by the cute picture of him at the age of seven which adorns the dust jacket, and subsequent pictures I have seen of him sporting a mane of unruly hair and a Bob Dylan cap. His Salford background is very far from the "cheerful promiscuity of the slums" evoked in The Uses of Literacy. This is a grim world of deprivation, disappointment and poor spirit. As he says of his family:

"We led a cowed, daunted existence, socially sophisticated enough to be conscious of our social inferiority. Our aim was to have the words "We were no trouble" inscribed on our tombstones. A knock on the door would send us scrambling in terror like the thump of an SS rifle butt, so unaccustomed we were to visitors. The sparsely furnished house was like a Beckettian stage-set in which nothing ever happened, since we lacked the resources for eventfulness to occur."

Eagleton's portrait of Salford life is about as grim as it gets, even though his turn of phrase is unerringly felicitous, full of pathos, humour or irony. Particularly moving, for me, is the portrayal of the uncommunicative father:

"What I remember most of my father is silence. He was silent because he was agonizingly inarticulate, and deeply ashamed of it. One failure of speech thus overlaid another. He was cut off from communication, lacking language to excess."

Implicit in this relationship, or lack of it, pathetically featured in the closing pages of the memoir as he dies at the very moment Eagleton is taking his Cambridge entrance examination, is the author's apparent search for a father substitute in his life. This may be unpalatably psychoanalytical for the Marxist Eagleton, but it is a motif which is obvious to the reader, if not to the author. Laurence Bright, Raymond Williams and Eagleton's supervisor, Dr Greenway all figure, more or less improbably as objects of this emotional quest.

Amidst the squalor of Salford, Catholicism, with all its world-denying excesses seems to Eagleton to offer some kind of an alternative to those who have nothing. The title of the memoir refers to his bizarre childhood post in a strict Carmelite convent guarding the portal between the sacred and profane worlds. Although the extreme nature of Catholic practices is treated with delightful humour and irreverence, the author has a deep respect for what he sees as the other-worldly self-denial and anti-materialism and of the Carmelite Order. It is an emotional disposition which will stay with him:

"A catholic aversion to subjectivism went along with a working class allergy to ostentation" and "Catholics did not go in for all that subjective mush."

This strong prejudice in favour of Catholicism certainly helped to form his thought in the late sixties, although he gives no clue in The Gatekeeper as to what extent he might have outgrown it.

Catholicism allows Eagleton to bypass the slough of liberal humanism, subjectivism, Protestantism and "interiority" and transfer directly to Marxism. He is well aware that "Catholics make good authoritarians," a remark which I hope implies criticism, but from the point of view of a liberal agnostic, and one who does not view either of these words as pejorative, this whole way of thinking is shot through with paradox. Catholics are not communists, or anything vaguely resembling them; their philosophy is not objective in any meaningful way; they are more concerned with the good of the soul than the progress of humanity; their religion is systematic, but this does not necessarily mean that it is intellectually coherent. Catholics and ex-Catholics like to believe that there is something very clever about the specious casuistry that supports the Catholic world-view; perhaps it gives them a sense of superiority and otherness. Perhaps that delight in paradox is part and parcel of the face Eagleton likes to turn towards the world. However, the dogmatic frame of mind that goes with Catholic ideology clearly is akin to the kind of mind-set associated with Marxism or literary theory. Let's have done with soul-searching and go straight for an objective system. Suspect and superficial, in my opinion, but Eagleton'e point is make it clear where he's coming from.

For me, the funniest and most readable sections of the book are "Dons" and "Aristos". Eagleton's portrait of Dr. Greenway gives him unlimited scope to satirize the kind of educational philosophy that still obtained in Cambridge in the late fifties:

"He sometimes lectured on Greek tragedy, trawling through the text line by line in a dry monotone but occasionally peering excitedly at the lectern, as though he had just spotted an exotic insect nestling in his book, exclaiming in a tone of mounting urgency, "Just a minute, there's a crux (textual problem) here!"

Greenway is a supremely "cultivated" figure for whom the educational process is entirely free of ideas; he is a cultured man with an effortlessly acquired pool of useless knowledge including:

" ..cheeses, wisteria, Rubens' brushwork, herbaceous border, flying buttresses, gilt-edged securities, the bird life of Venezuela, varieties of Malaysian fruit, Leibnitz, Gregorian chant, brandy, the law of tort, the manufacture of saddles…" etc. He was a man who "saw education as an unfolding of ignorance rather than an accumulating knowledge."

Although Eagleton terms him a "liberal", a use of the word peculiar to this era of political consciousness, and one which defies common sense usage, his sense of an appropriate division of labour is typically old-world conservative:

"A friend of mine, a fellow student, was once sitting talking to him in his study when the room began to grow cold. There was a small electric fire, its switch a foot or so from Greenway's armchair, but he did not turn it on. Instead, he crossed the room, lifted the telephone, and summoned a college servant to switch it on for him."

Greenway does this not out of any sense of snobbery but in an inept sense of propriety; in his world, there are certain people employed to deal with machinery, and he is not one of them. The entertainment value of Greenway alone would have made this book a good purchase, but I am only using him as an example. There are many more larger-than-life characters inhabiting these pages.

For the really picky, Eagleton's tendency to skate around in random directions might be disconcerting. The section which mentions Watford, London and Stratford (page 173) seems to me to lack textual and geographical coherence, and where the wonderfully funny section on clichés comes from (page 164), I have no idea. Perhaps Eagleton is playing some kind of post-structuralist joke on us, but never mind, it's all hugely entertaining. His verbal exuberance occasionally gets the better of him in sentences like, "Eccentricity is the nobility's equivalent of colonial perversity," but it is generally to his credit that he is able to present challenging intellectual material in a way that leads you to believe you have understood it.

The Gatekeeper is good value at £9.99, for the laughs alone. For a serious student of literary theory, it covers an era of radical change in British academia, the repercussions of which are still very much with us today. Whatever you think of literary theory, Eagleton does well to show us the human face of one of its most distinguished proponents.