Terry Eagleton, enfant terrible of the
British lit crit establishment, is one of Gert’s heroes. It seems, though according to a review of his
recent “How to read literature” in The
Guardian, that Terry is a bit of an old fogey after all. http://www.theguardian.com/books/2013/jul/26/how-read-literature-eagleton-review
The decidedly old-fashioned side to the radical
leftie Eagleton was already evident in his memoir “The Gatekeeper”, more a
series of essays cobbled together than an autobiography but a wonderfully funny
and touching account of the quintessential scholarship boy, born in the
unrelenting bleakness of 1950s Salford. Wearing a coat to school, which
Eagleton did because of his poor health, “marked me out as sinisterly as if I
had arrived at school in a Bentley with a caviar lunch tucked under my arm”
(49) He progressed from here to Cambridge, arriving “an eighteen-year-old
working-class Catholic, as certain as a speak-your-weight machine and as
ignorant as a fish” and coming out the other end of the academic machine as a
renowned scholar of literature, politics, culture and class.
The book opens with the truly surreal story
of 10-year-old Terry’s job as “gatekeeper” at the local Carmelite monastery.
Among other things, this involved lugging the elderly convent watchdog Timothy
onto a turntable so that he could be passed in and out of the convent “as though
required for some secret bestial rite”.
Eagleton is acute and astute when writing
of Catholicism:
It
was less about charity than about candelabras.
We were pious and heartless, strict-minded and mean, pure-living and
pagan. (30)
A
radical stress on material practice, on the public, collective, symbolic
dimensions of selfhood was entwined with a callous impersonality which would
make even Stalin seem sentimental. (32)
Despite
the benighted autocracy of their church, Catholics are prime candidates for the
political left. They are …taught to
value systematic thought, feel at ease with the
collective, symbolic dimensions of human existence and are wary of
subjectivism. They also…. inherit a fertile tradition of ethical and political
thought, and are not afraid to think ambitiously. (35-6)
The old-fogey side shows through in
constant swipes at Americans and post-modernism. But Gert can always forgive
someone who writes like this:
[Raymond
Williams’] very presence deranged the conventional categories, and his fellow
dons gathered inquisitively around him like zoologists around a dolphin whose
low droning might just be a recitation of the Iliad. (26)
…childhood
[is] a mixture of self-evident truths with an alarming inability to grasp what
is going on (31).
...as
stunning a rebuff as if the royal family were to renounce horse-racing (40)
My
own personal proposal for furthering the cause of Socialism would be to abolish
sport (83)
Of giving papers at conferences:
If
your subject is the poetry of Northern Ireland some aggrieved audience member
will enquire why you have been so churlishly silent about fin-de-siecle
Bavarian orthopaedics (99)
Of an upper-class twit:
He
spoke his few words like a man trying out some fiendishly difficult language which
he had picked up a smattering of but had not yet dared to practise in public (156)
And finally, of his father:
What
I remember most of my father is silence.
He was silent because he was agonizingly inarticulate and deeply ashamed
of it…. I am still not sure whether his silence was a rock or an abyss,
strength or indifference. He was painfully shy and unsociable, but also
practical, rational, reliable and infinitely patient. (121)
