Christopher Ricks

Unlike the publication in 1975 of the touching acute letters of Cyril Connolly to Noel Blakiston, the publication of Connolly’s Journal (1928-1937) does not serve him, except right. He found D.H. Lawrence insufficiently magnanimous (‘Notice how carefully Lawrence refuses to recognise virtue in anyone but himself’), and his sponsor David Pryce-Jones now finds F.R. Leavis much the same, so it may be legitimate to cite the famous excoriation of Bloomsbury that was voiced by Lawrence and amplified by Leavis: ‘they talked endlessly, but endlessly – and never, never a good thing said. They are cased each in a hard littte shell of his own and out of this they talk words. There is never for one second any outgoing of feeling and no reverence, not a crumb or grain of reverence: I cannot stand it.’ The reason why ‘never a good thing said’ was such a good thing to say is that it aligns speaking well with speaking well of others. In that world, a very special thrill attached to speaking ill of one’s friends.–

The alphabet does happy things. The first entry in the Concise Oxford Dictionary of Proverbs is able to give unforced priority to some of the most important properties of proverbs. ‘Absence makes the heart grow fonder.’ First, that it is more recent than you think (c.1850). Second, that nobody has ever heard of the talented person who endowed it with the anonymity of genius (T.H. Bayly). Third, that – divinely wise – it sprang full-grown from its creator’s head; perfect, just like that. Fourth, that it evokes what for some is the glory of proverbs and is their ignominy for others. The Observer in 1923 waxed: ‘These saws are constantly cutting one another’s throats. How can you reconcile the statement that “Absence makes the heart grow fonder” with “Out of sight, out of mind”?’ Later in the book, there appears another of the newspaper’s rhetorical questions: ‘What is the use of saying that “Many hands make light work” when the same copy-book tells you that “Too many cooks spoil the broth”?’

These ‘Critical Heritage’ volumes on T. S. Eliot get off to a bad start, and persevere. The chosen items are ‘printed verbatim’, ‘apart from the silent correction of spelling errors and other minutiae’. Why then preserve ‘elegaic’ and For Launcelot Andrewes? Did F.L. Lucas really write, unremarked, that Eliot may have been indebted to something called ‘Childe Harold to the Dark Tower Came’? Yes he did, actually. But the editing and printing of these books are so slovenly that, half-unjustly, one is inclined to give everybody else the benefit of the doubt. Meeting a critic called Cleanth Brook, or a title The Romantic Image, or an Eliot work called ‘Eeldrop and Applepex’, one is in danger of what would here be called apopexy. French words are usually, though not with the assurance of invariability, docked of their accents. English words mutate into such forms as ‘notive’, ‘wordly’, ‘myseries’, and ‘conrete’. Sometimes you start to wonder whether it is the original author (in the following case, Harriet Monroe) or the editor (Michael Grant) or you yourself who must be getting giddy: ‘While stating nothing, it suggests everything that is in his rapidly moving mind, in a series of shifting scenes which fade in and out of each other like the cinema. The form, with its play of many-colored lights on words that flash from everywhere in the poet’s dream, is a perfect expression of the shifting scenes which fade in and out of each other like the cinema. The form, with its play of many-colored lights on words that flash from everywhere in the poet’s dream, is a perfect expression of the shifting tortures in his soul.’ Come again? Or rather, let the middle sentence go.

Donald Davie’s critical arguments are often happily reminiscential, and his reminiscences are often happily argumentative, so the difference in kind between these two admirable books doesn’t make for any great difference of temper. The critical essays which make up Dissentient Voice: Enlightenment and Christian Dissent are an act of making good; they fulfil the promise and they repair the deficiencies of Davie’s earlier book on Dissent and culture, A Gathered Church. The recollections gathered as These the Companions are an act of making permanent, with such permanence as time has; they fulfil a promise often made and often kept in Davie’s poems but which these days asks, too, for the expatiating element of prose: the exercise of ‘the faculty of pious memory’.

‘He is stuck on himself. It isn’t all that easy to see why. He is, after all, only a literary journalist.’ Clive James hardily dispatches someone who is a television celebrity as well as a journalist, Malcolm Muggeridge.