I can remember listening to a conversation which took place outside the house of John Newton, one of my Cambridge supervisors. The only other person present was Harold Mason, who had been an editor ofScrutinyand a staunch collaborator of Leavis in the 1940s. Sometime in the mid-1950s, Mason had left Cambridge in order to teach English in Exeter but he had recently reappeared as the holder of the F. R. Leavis Lectureship. This was a post that Newton and others had succeeded in establishing after there had been a public appeal for the necessary funds. The idea was...

I used to think that practically all Leavis’s pupils must (like me) have come from grammar schools, but there was in fact quite a strong contingent from those largely non-boarding but fee-paying establishments that lay between the State sector at one extreme and Eton or Harrow at the other (Dulwich College, with its large number of pupils on local or county scolarships, would be one example). I was born in an unlovely suburb called Swinton and Pendlebury, which lies about four miles out of Salford on the road from Manchester towards the coast. My grammar school was in Whitefield, at...

In the second volume of his autobiography, Stephen Fry, who went to Cambridge almost twenty years after I did, refers to Leavis as a ‘sanctimonious prick of only parochial significance’. I take this to be more or less the current view, colourfully expressed; but it seems to me wrong on two counts. In the first place, the significance of Leavis in his own day was far from parochial. This was in part because he had established a power base in the schools to which my fellow students at Downing were the living testimony. From the beginning he had seen the...

Leavis was, as I have said, an indulgent teacher, but then he needed to be. As he looked round his latest recruits in the fight against low standards, he must sometimes have felt like a desperate German general in the last days of the Second World War. Many of his seminars were surveys of the main figures in various set periods of English literature, but there were also sessions of what is usually known as ‘practical criticism’. Because this is a term which in a few years is likely to become incomprehensible, it may be worth recording that it derives...

A university is, or ought to be, a world of extraordinary new possibilities for the student who first arrives there. I was one of the gullible horde who signed up for the freshmen’s tour of the Cambridge Union, forked out the rather large joining fee, and never set foot in the building again. But for those not interested in trying to make their way into politics, there were plenty of other ways of spending their spare time: societies of all sorts that catered for a myriad of interests. A fair number of students always regarded this extra-curricular life as the...

Irreverently and chauvinistically, Mrs Leavis was usually referred to by our group as Queenie. In spite of the Q. D. Leavis which appeared on her books (the D standing for Dorothy), I thought for years that this involved an abbreviation or sobriquet of some kind. Only much later did I come across John Osborne’s references to his Aunt Queenie and realise that the name was one actually given to some girls by their parents around the beginning of the last century. Much as I enjoyed being taught by her husband, I cannot say the same for her. She had been...

The person who describedFiction and the Reading Publicas causing ‘something of a sensation’ was a Cambridge lecturer called F. L. Lucas. For him, the book was full of ‘angry arrogance’ and a symptom of the unfortunate emphasis oncriticismin the teaching of English at Cambridge. ‘The more I see, in education, of Criticism in its ordinary sense of judging books – what the elect call “evaluation”’, he wrote, in a manifestation of fellow feeling with the Oxford don who had rebuked Robert Graves, ‘the more I doubt its use’. He complained that what Mrs Leavis’s denunciation of...

As Lucas’s review ofFiction and the Reading Publicmight suggest, King’s College, with its strong Bloomsbury connections, was often a centre of opposition to the Leavises. It was to another of its fellows, ‘Dadie’ Rylands, a former Etonian who, like Lucas, had begun his academic career in Classics and then switched to English, that Maurice Bowra wrote in order to give his impression of Leavis at about the time I was being taught by him. This was also the period when Leavis was developing a small following in Oxford so that it is almost certainly there that Bowra would...

Although it was soon suggested to me that the word referred to the three-legged stools on which students formally sat their examinations, I thought it was typical of Cambridge that the EnglishTriposshould be divided into only two parts. In my first weeks there, I was asked to go for a supervision on Chaucer with a supervisor who lived in an outlying village called Coton. Having been to the bookshop and bought a second-hand Chaucer which turned out on inspection to be a nineteenth-century translation, I jumped on my bike and made off in the general direction of where...

I arrived back in Cambridge to find that Leavis had become what might now be called a celebrity. In my first two years, I had often been made aware that there were circles in which he was well known. Asked by certain people where I was studying English, I had only to tell them Downing to see a wary glint appear in their eyes. But these were a minority in the know whereas now everyone I met seemed familiar with his name. The reason was the text of one of his lectures which had appeared inThe Spectatorand been...

Because the end of Finals left me at a loose end and I found nothing better to do, I wandered back to France. There must have been in either London or Paris an office which dealt with the distribution of French assistantships since I remember going there in the summer and asking whether there were any of what at that late point would be ‘returns’ or cancellations. Given the circumstances, I ought to have found myself trying to teach English to small groups somewhere in the Morvan, or a run-down area of one of the industrial cities, but instead I...

The topic I had chosen when I made my application for a State studentship was the reception of French literature in England during the mid-nineteenth century. I think it had occurred to me when reading Matthew Arnold and wondering what the state of play had been before he came on the scene; but I suspect it was also designed to keep up my connection with France (and perhaps help me get back there). The first problem was to find a supervisor, someone who, without necessarily being a nineteenth-century specialist, would not be a liability in the poisonous atmosphere of the...

My Ph.D. was a mistake for which I only have myself to blame, but at least it got me back to Paris. I spent the middle of the three years of the State studentship in a fourth floor flat from the windows of which one could see the side wall of Saint-Sulpice. Opposite the façade of this church, and across Saint-Sulpice square, was the town hall of the sixth arrondissment where I was married. The official who performed the ceremony was a portly man with a wide tri-colour sash diagonally displayed across his ample chest and lower regions. His splendid...

As the end of my three year studentship approached, my Ph.D. was still far from finished. This was a common situation at the time when many graduate students used their grant money for the acquisition of a more general education and treated the writing of an actual thesis as a side-show. In a way which would be impossible for their equivalents today (when the authorities are much more anxious to see an ‘outcome’ for their money), they indulged themselves in a great deal of reading which, from the point of view of finishing the Ph.D. on time, could accurately be...

The contentment we felt in Australia was compounded by our finding an exceptional place to live. This was in what can only be called a village (although the word seems inappropriate), then on the very edge of Melbourne’s continuing expansion into the surrounding bush. We met there an old Australian who wanted to rent a house he had built himself. It was a simple, single-storied affair, but it stood on a hill from where there were no other buildings in sight, and was surrounded by about an acre of land. At the bottom of the hill, just beyond our entrance...

The senior members of the English staff at Kent were not unsympathetic to Leavisian principles. The most senior among them (a well-known Shakespearian) could be irritated when I joined with the close friend I mentioned to propose the inclusion or exclusion of texts from certain courses, or expressed scepticism about a degree in film studies he was anxious to establish. When I turned up for a committee one day and someone pointed out that it was not my name but my friend’s which was on the list of appointed members, he muttered grumpily under his breath, ‘Same thing’. After his...

A perhaps more significant illustration of the unintended consequences of social action than devolved budgets was the government’s introduction of the ‘research assessment exercise’, the infamous RAE (as it used to be called). The attitude to research when I first began teaching was relaxed. One of our external examiners at Kent once described to us how, at a set time every year, the senior English professor at his own university would stalk down the departmental corridor, knocking on every door. If members of his staff talked of the new courses in which they had been involved, he would tell them...

That for most of my life I have been a teacher of ‘English’ would have both amazed and puzzled my father. Lawrentians are fond, perhaps over-fond, of a story Lawrence tells in one of his late autobiographical writings. His first novel having just been published, he showed a copy to his father who asked him how much he had been paid for it. When Lawrence told him fifty pounds, the dumbfounded response was ‘Fifty pounds! An’ tha’s niver done a hard day’s work in thy life’. No writer ever worked harder than Lawrence, and often under the most extreme difficulties,...

In matters intellectual, I have been lucky enough to have known three exceptional individuals. Enright sits uneasily among them because he always made such efforts to appear ordinary; but his publications speak for themselves. It is a coincidence that the second person happened to be a colleague of Enright’s in Singapore before coming to Kent. Frank Cioffi was a six-foot-four American who could never pass for ordinary and who had an astonishing grip on his audience whenever he lectured. He would shamble into the lecture hall, explain very clearly a philosophical issue that interested him and then keep everyone both...