Literary Criticism: A collection of energetic, perceptive essays shows its author is aworthy heir of Johnson and of Hazlitt
John Bayley is a sly old thing. He spent the larger part of his working life teaching literature at Oxford yet manages in his criticism to seem a footloose freelance in the tradition of Edmund Wilson and VS Pritchett. Indeed, his rare outbursts of hostility are almost all aimed at academe, and he never misses an opportunity to take a swipe at literary theorists such as Roland Barthes and the "clever men" at Yale University, onetime GHQ of the deconstructionists. Bayley's preferences are nicely set out in a 1973 review of two books on Balzac, the first by Pritchett, who is commended for his "straightforward and pragmatic relish in his subject", and Barthes, whose "style is portentous and his build-up of jargon formidable beyond necessity".
Even Bayley's occasional slips of the pen - confusing Axel's Castle with Axël, for instance, or taking Rilke's self-composed epitaph for lines from the Sonnets to Orpheus - only strengthen the image of him as an inspired amateur, and endear rather than irritate.
His heroes and heroines among critics are, like himself, the relaxed, discursive humanists, a surprising majority of whom, such as John Updike and AS Byatt, are part-timers with better things to do, although he does include the distinctly unrelaxed FR Leavis in his personal pantheon. In a significantly titled essay In Praise of the Amateur Approach, he calls for support upon Updike and Byatt, Leavis and Randall Jarrell and, of course, the ever-present Victor Pritchett, all of whom, in contrast to what he calls the "high-tech men", are ready to enter into the diversity and viscosity of the written word, the blatant assault of the personal. The act of liking or disliking a novelist can still seem a sudden intimacy: whether or not you get on is your own affair, and as used to be said, there is no accounting for tastes. The best critics are not necessarily teachers, but theorists almost invariably are, and they have come to dread the direct untreated response by their students [and, we infer, by old-fashioned critics such as himself], pronouncing EM Forster soppy, or Virginia Woolf a bit of a bitch. High-tech negates such responses, rescuing itself from social and worldly critical converse - the medium in which the novel naturally swims.
Bayley speaks softly and wields a big stick. If at times he sounds somewhat curmudgeonly, one imagines he does not mind that at all. He attacks the theorists for what he sees as the willed impenetrability of their style and the generally joyless, indeed vengeful, way in which they seize upon a text and shake it until most of the bits in it are broken.
Reviewing approvingly the book Gossip by Patricia Meyer Spacks, Bayley gleefully notes that the author is Chairperson of the English Faculty at the home of his bêtes noires, Yale University, and wonders if this might be evidence that "the teaching of literature is reverting to its old comfortable function of gossip about people in books" and that the "higher jargon" is on the way out.
In a piece on Betjeman he excoriates the use of the word "serious" applied to poets as "the mechanical accolade, the last infirmity of contemporary clichés"; as a critical term it is "deeply tainted by post-Arnoldian use, and should be retired indefinitely".
To such declarations one can only give vigorous approval. Yet in places he falls into a tone as smug as that of any Little Englander intent on seeing off those damned furriners and their fancy notions. Reviewing books by and about Graham Greene, Bayley writes:
The genre of thrillers and detective stories has strong appeal to deconstructural critics, to whose gimlet eyes its repetitive rituals and devices are wide open. But its more common readers generally make a more downright Johnsonian distinction between those they enjoy and the ones they don't go for. It is the simple distinction between what is convincing and what is not, what seems "real" and what seems false or made-up. No use the literary lads telling us it's all made-up, that the whole thing is composed not of life but of "literariness". We know what we like, and cling sturdily to the old distinction.
It is always a little worrying to hear an influential critic speaking of "clinging sturdily" to tradition in face of the disparaged "literary lads", and invoking Johnson the stone-kicker and champion of common sense and the roast beef of old England. Bayley might do well to heed the couplet of Richard Wilbur's which he quotes elsewhere:
Kick on, Sam Johnson, till you break your bones,
But cloudy, cloudy, is the stuff of stones.
Still, it is important - oops, is that another "infirm contemporary cliché"? - to recognise that Bayley knows what he is talking about, and that his talk is some of the most perceptive and subtle to be heard in contemporary criticism. If he pauses in his stately progress to deliver the "clever men" a sharp dig in the ribs a little too often and a little too easily, he is formidable indeed when he rolls up his sleeves and engages in a full frontal assault on them. The Wilbur quote is from a finely wrought and persuasive essay from 1986, The Order of Battle at Trafalgar, in which Bayley considers the "climate of structuralism" - remember structuralism? - under which traditional critical approaches have been abandoned and "codes and strategies have replaced facts and objects". What is it they want, these "new analysts" of academe who have displaced the "neoclassical critics and the old rhetoricians"?
They are dissatisfied with the traditional position of critics and teachers as on the sidelines of the real, watching the actual ball game, so to speak, and commenting on it as spectators. They wish to seem, by their processes, to be manufacturing the stuff itself, to manipulate and metamorphose it into endless new shapes, so that it becomes a cloudy constituent of the climate of the modern world. The process needs no facts and truths - the death of Napoleon or the battle of Trafalgar: these have only a relative existence, if any, in the new discourse.
This is the chief and strongest argument against theory and its proponents, that they want "to be manufacturing the stuff itself", and it is here pointedly and elegantly expressed. Not the least of the pleasures - the delights - of this generous selection of Bayley's criticism, made by Leo Carey, a New Yorker editor, is the superb quality of the writing. One might easily follow Walter Benjamin's ambition and construct a review entirely out of quotations lifted from the book itself.
Along with his mellifluous prose there goes a tendency to tuck up together in a revealing way the most unexpected bedfellows: in an essay on Tennyson, Wallace Stevens is found lying beside him, a large red man reading; in one on Betjeman, DH Lawrence suddenly pokes his head from under the covers. "Did Wittgenstein read PG Wodehouse?" Bayley wonders, playfully po-faced, deciding that probably the author of the Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus did not read the author of Right-Ho, Jeeves, but that if he had he would have "got on with him very well", since with Wodehouse "you knew where you were, and a philosopher likes that". When he judges the moment to require ferocity Bayley can be fierce. A piece here on Robert Lowell is striking for the vigour with which the critic reprehends what he considers the poet's ostentatious and ingrained class-consciousness - "If Robert Lowell had not been a Lowell would he ever have had the confidence to write the poems that he did?" Life Studies are, Bayley considers, "Lowell studies, in the same way that a prince of the blood might become absorbed, without either self-consciousness or false modesty, in compiling an intimate dynastic chronicle". It is this "regal touch" which Bayley finds offensive. Of a Vermeer analogy invoked in Lowell's poem Epilogue -
Pray for the grace of accuracy
Vermeer gave to the sun's illumination
Stealing like a tide across a map
To his girl solid with yearning
- he writes with disdain that "those lines seem to me not only bad but remarkably vulgar as well, with the sort of involuntary vulgarity which upper class assumptions of universal ownership entail".
Is this fair, and are the lines that bad? Any artist in search of a metaphor will call up one or more of his betters with a fine disregard for the social niceties, and in doing so will likely not be accused of making a "graffiti scribble" across the work of an exalted predecessor, which is what Bayley believes Lowell has done. Art is a rough-and-tumble business, and TS Eliot was surely right in his observation, which Bayley quotes in relation to his revered WH Auden, that "the bad poet imitates, the good poet steals". In the matter of Vermeer, Bayley lifts the stolen laurel from Lowell and hands it instead to Philip Larkin, "the interior of [whose] poetry, like a Vermeer interior," Bayley beautifully writes, seeing no trace of vulgarity, "is both wholly accessible and completely mysterious". For the critic no less than the reader, it depends on his knowing what he likes, and clinging sturdily to the old distinction. Of the ruthless, not to say heartless, way in which Lowell used the details of his private life and loves as the stuff of his poetry, Bayley is unjudgmental, which well behoves the author of Iris: A Memoir.
Bayley is a good, at times a great, critic, and we should be grateful for this collection of his essays, many of which were written for the New York Review of Books. The expansiveness of the NYR pages allowed and allow him - he continues to write as energetically as ever - just the right working space for his talent, for he is a master of the medium-sized essay, and a worthy heir of Johnson and of Hazlitt. His humility before the text is admirable - not for him the high-techies' wish to seem "to be manufacturing the stuff itself". The entire volume could well have been called In Praise of the Amateur Approach, that emblematic piece in which, bemoaning the virtual extinction of "the old-fashioned humanities man", this triumphantly sturdy survivor of the species writes:
On questions of art and literature the man of letters did at least say straight out what he thought, however much he may have been conditioned to think it. He did not compel a work of art to understand, indeed to create, itself: he gave his own response to it, his own awareness of approval, curiosity, or dislike, which he could justify only in part or not at all, since they came out of him as the work of art from its source, albeit on an appropriately lower level.
John Banville's new novel, The Sea, will be published later this month by Picador
The Power of Delight - A Lifetime in Literature: Essays 1962-2002. By John Bayley. Duckworth, 677pp. £25