Christopher Ricks

‘Women are bitches.’ It was odd and ugly of J. R. Ackerley to put it like that, since both the sentence before this terse rancour and the one after it dote upon a bitch, his dog Queenie. Much-loved Joe Ackerley was not much-loving, but he did love his dog, loved her even more than he loathed his sister Nancy. Nancy loathed them both back. She also loathed their old aunt Bunny, whom Ackerley only intermittently hated. When Ackerley took a break, he contrived a busman’s Roman holiday, since he went to stay with Siegfried Sassoon, who was fully occupied loathing his wife, as she him. ‘He was obviously very wrought up over her emotional persecution of him, and described at much length her jealous rows, resentments, emotional blackmail, etc. He was describing Nancy.’ Nancy was chagrined at not having been invited, so Ackerley gave it her straight:

Ian McEwan’s tale is as economical as a shudder. It never itself shudders, which is one reason why it makes you do so. By staying cool in the face of the murderous madness which it contemplates, it precipitates an icy sweat. What it does even with equanimity is not to display it. A characteristic McEwan sentence is one of which it might be said (here in Venice revisited) that the law allows it and the court awards it. ‘She loved him, though not at this particular moment.’ This means what it says, exactly. It is not a warrant for sarcasm’s burliness, for inferring that she didn’t really love him at other moments, or that she really disliked him at this particular moment. Grim, laconic and humorous, it is a bracing sentence, a short, sharp shock.

‘Authors are not the solitaries of the Romantic myth, but citizens.’ The spirit of Marilyn Butler’s excellent book on the Romantics is itself that of citizenship: of belonging to a civilised community, cultural and intellectual, which one helps to sustain and is sustained by, and which makes possible the truest duties, rights and privileges. Rewards, too, and the rewards of this radiating and radiant book are great. For if from one point of view Marilyn Butler is the citizen of a smallish community within a community – those within universities who speak of English literature – from another she is importantly and not self-importantly a citizen of the world. The term naturally has its good-natured comedy, and she describes it – when conferred by Goldsmith on his visiting Chinaman, a penetrating watcher of 18th-century English civilisation – as ‘a phrase both levelling and universal’. (One, incidentally, which itself helps to sustain a community of the like-minded, since Goldsmith shares the right to it with his fellow citizens Caxton and Bacon.) Dr Butler is a citizen of the world not only in that she does not – cannot, in pursuit of her essential questions – limit herself to English Romanticism; and not only in that she writes with a witty clarity, humane and free, such as makes her book uncondescendingly open to a much larger world than the academic one; but also in that her preoccupation is the pressure of the great world upon Romantic literature – the pressure, in particular, of national and international affairs.

Donne’s powers are, for John Carey, a matter of power, the poems being ‘the most enduring exhibition of the will to power the English Renaissance produced’. The praises of Donne in this critical work of amazing flair and obduracy are single-minded: Donne is here valued, supremely, for the power and tenacity of his ego, for his imaginative energy, for his desire to dominate or his rage for supremacy, and for the obsession with which he registered the contrarieties and contradictions of life ‘in all their urgent discord’. For Carey, these powers, these sheer strengths, sweep everything before them, razing moral questions to moralism, spiritual values to pietism, and critical reservations to prissiness. Carey’s book is itself alive with the kind of energy which it attributes to Donne, and since he can think of no higher compliments than those he pays Donne, he will presumably be very happy to have them returned to him.