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Raymond Williams

Daring, controversial and brimming with intellectual rigour and integrity,

Raymond Williams's work is increasingly regarded as one of the milestones in
twentieth-century criticism. Williams successfully challenged the reigning
academic orthodoxy in such seminal works as Culture and Society, Drama from
Ibsen to Brecht, The Country and the City and Marxism and Literature.

Raymond Williams: Literature, Marxism and Cultural Materialism offers the

single most comprehensive historical and theoretical account of Williams's work
to date. John Higgins examines what Williams termed his prolonged argument
with 'official English culture', focusing particular on the complex and
ambivalent relation of his thinking to its two main sources: Marxist cultural
theory and Cambridge English studies. Higgins provides a detailed account of
the different contexts and occasions of Williams's arguments and interventions,
tracing the dynamic development of his work from its beginnings in the 1940s'
debates on Marxism and culture, through the cultural politics of the New Left
and the later critique of structuralism, to its culmination in the theory and
practice of cultural materialism. This book vigorously challenges many of the
received ideas and images of the value and substance of Williams's work,
throwing new light on his crucial relation to figures such as T.S. Eliot,
Christopher Caudwell and Mikhail Bakhtin, and offers a powerful argument for
the continued relevance of Williams's thought to contemporary debates.

John Higgins is Senior Lecturer in the Department of English at the

University of Cape Town, and a Convenor of the Theory of Literature
Programme. He is the founding editor of the South Mrican journal, Pretexts:
Studies in Writing and Culture, and the author of numerous articles on film,
literature and cultural politics.
Critics of the Twentieth Century
General editor: Christopher Norris
University o/Wales, Cardiff

Northrop Frye Postmodern Brecht

The theoretical imagination Are-presentation
Jonathan Hart Elizabeth Wright

A.J. Gerimas and the nature of meaning Deleuze and Guattari

Ronald Schleifer Ronald Bogue

Christopher Caudwell The Ecstasies of Roland Barthes

Robert Sullivan Mary Bittener Wiseman

Figuring Lacan Jiirgen Habermas

Criticism and the cultural unconscious Critic in the public sphere
Juliet Power MacCannell Robert Holub

Harold Bloom William Empson

Towards historical rhetorics Prophet against sacrifice
Peter de Bolla PautH. Pry

Julia Kristeva Paul Ricoeuer

John Lechte S.H. Clark

Geoffrey Hartman Introducing Lyotard

Criticism as answerable style Art and politics
G. Douglas Atkins Bill Readings

Ezra Pound as Literary Critic F.R Leavis

K.K. Ruthven Michael Bell

Kenneth Burke Roman Jakobson

Rhetoric and ideology Life, language, art
Stephen Bygrave Richard Bradford

Antonio Gramsci Jacques Derrida

Beyond Marxism and postmodernism Opening lines
Renate Holub Marian Hobson
Raymond Williams
Literature, Marxism and cultural
materialism

John Higgins

London and New York

First published 1999
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon, OX14 4RN

Transferred to Digital Printing 2005

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada

by Routledge
270 Madison Ave, New York NY 10016

© 1999 John Higgins

Typeset in Baskerville by Routledge

All rights reserved. No part ofthis book may be reprinted or

reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission in
writing from the publishers.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloguing in Publication Data

Higgins, John. Raymond Williams: literature, Marxism, and cultural
materialism. Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Williams, Raymond - Knowledge and learning.
2. literature - History and criticism - Theory, etc.
3. Criticism - England - History - 20th century.
4. Marxist criticism - England. 5. Culture-
Historiography. 6. Historical materialism. I. Title. II. Series: Critics
ofthe twentieth century (London, England).
PR6073.I4329768 1999
98-31008
828'.91409-dc21

ISBN 0--415-02344-0 (hbk)

ISBN 0--415-02345-9 (pbk)
In memory of Margaret Higgins 1921-1981
Contents

Acknowledgements VHt

Introduction 1

1 The tight place: Marxism or literature? 1947-50 4

2 Drama and the structure offeeling 1947-54 21

3 Culture and communication 1950-62 46

4 Cambridge criticism 1962-73 65

5 Marxisms: contra Caudwell, against Althusser 100

6 Towards a cultural materialism 1977-81 125

7 Against the new conformism 1981-7 145

Conclusion 169

Notes 178
Bibliography 203
Index 224
Acknowledgements

'he is trying to write down a book he wrote years ago in his head'
'South America'

Tom Raworth's line, from his fine poem 'South America', always seemed to
capture something of my predicament with this project. would never have
made it on to the page without the encouragement of friends and family too
numerous to mention, but they all know who they are, and what their kind
support has meant to me over the years, whether in Great Britain, Switzerland
or South Africa.
More formally, though the substance of the debt goes beyond formality, I
take the opportunity to thank those who provided some of the concrete
occasions for writing or speaking on Williams's work. Many thanks are due to
both Bruce Robbins and Jonathan Arac for their early encouragement to write
on Williams for boundary 2, and similarly to Michael Sprinker (the minnesota
review); thanks also to Susan van Zyl (Journal of Literary Studies) and
Christopher Prendergast (Social Text Collective) for later opportunities.
I am also grateful to Peter de Bolla (formerly University of Geneva), Peter
Kohler (University of the Western Cape), Reingard Nethersole (University of
the Witwatersrand), Maud Ellmann (King's College, Cambridge), Stewart
Crehan (University of the Transkei), and Fredric Jan1eson (Duke University) for
invitations to speak on Williams at their respective institutions. All of these
occasions contributed in some way to the formulations presented here.
More specifically, thanks are due to Tina Barsby, Louise Green and David
Schalkwyk, who each read parts of the manuscript and gave their always
welcome and insightful advice. Christopher Prendergast read an early draft of
the book as a whole, and his critical comments were acute and stimulating.
number of informal conversations with Terry Eagleton, Edward Said and
Gareth Stedman Jones were also very useful to me, as was the general
encouragement of both Tony Tanner* and Gayatri Spivak. My most pervasive
debt is to Frances Long-Innes, for more than a decade of ever-stimulating and
critical dialogue.
I benefited enormously in the final stages of writing and revision from my
sustaining dialogue with Jessica Dubow; and the very careful readings of the
 Acknowledgements ix
book made by John Coetzee, Anthony Morphet and John Kench: to respond
adequately to their probing critical concerns - as to those of Routledge's
readers (Christopher Norris, who also first suggested the idea for the book,
Graham Martin, and Terry Eagleton) - would have made it necessary to write a
different and better study than this. I should also record that the late Raymond
Williams was kind enough to offer help and encouragement at an early stage in
the planning of this work.
My thanks also to the staff at the University Library in Cambridge, the
British Museum Reading Room, and the library of the University of Cape
Town, who were unfailingly patient and helpful with my search for materials
and information; and to the King's College Research Centre for kindly allowing
me office space during a visit to Cambridge.

Sadly, Tony Tanner died in his rooms at King's on December 5, 1998. My intellectual debts to him go far
beyond what can be acknowledged with respect to this particular project.
Introduction

Raymond Williams died, more than a decade ago now, in January 1988. The
immediate response was overwhelming: progressive intellectuals throughout the
world mourned the passing of one of the foremost socialist thinkers, intellect-
uals and cultural activists of the postwar period. In the obituary columns of
leading newspapers, at conferences and on television, and in the pages of
academic journals, we saw the public mourning of a figure who was, in Patrick
Parrinder's words, 'father-figure to thousands', who was, for Juliet Mitchell and
many more like her, 'an intellectual and moral touchstone,.l Who was this
remarkable figure and why should his work continue to hold our interest and
attention? We can begin to answer these questions by looking briefly at the
background and career of Britain's most distinguished socialist thinker on
culture of the past forty years.
Raymond Henry Williams was born in the small Welsh village of Pandy in
1921, the son of a railway signalman. He won a scholarship to Cambridge in
1939 where he was active in the student branch of the Communist Party and
the Cambridge University Socialist Club. He was called up in 1941 and fought
as a tank commander in a number of the most bloody battles of the Second
World War, returning to Cambridge in 1946 to complete his degree in English
with a powerful dissertation on Ibsen in which some of his own sense of
vocational crisis came through. For the next fourteen years, Williams worked as
a tutor in adult education. 3 This move, and the consequent departure from the
usual university syllabus of English studies, provided some of the ground for the
writing of two seminal works which challenged the existing paradigm of literary
studies, and did much to help the emergence of the new disciplines of cultural
studies. Culture and Society 1780-1950 (1958) and The Long Revolution (1961)
established his reputation as the leading thinker of the New Left; in the words
of the historian Edward Thompson, 'our best man,.4
In 1961, Williams received a letter from the English Faculty of the Univer-
sity of Cambridge informing him that he had been appointed Lecturer in
English; a few days later, other letters arrived, encouraging him to apply for the
post!5 Discouraged by the shift of emphasis in adult education away from
working-class education and towards middle-class provision, Williams accepted
the post and was to spend the rest of his working life at Cambridge, first as a
2 Introduction
lecturer and then, from 1974, as Professor of Drama. It was from here, the
centre of Britain's elite educational system, that Williams was to produce a body
of work which challenged many of that elite culture's central assumptions, not
only as they appeared in English studies, but also as they informed the
dominant modes of thinking about politics and society, and as they swayed
assessments of the very possibility of progressive social and political action. As
he clarified during the exhaustive interviews with the New Left Review,
published as Politics and Letters in 1979, his work was above all the work of an
oppositional intellectual: 'If you look at the implied relationships of nearly all
the books I have written, I have been arguing with what I take to be official
English culture' (Williams 1979: 316).
This study takes that argument with 'official culture' as its guiding thread,
and follows it across the twenty-four or so volumes of his academic writing. On
the way, it challenges some of the received ideas concerning his work. Chap-
ter 1 examines Williams's earliest writings, and particularly the essays written for
the journals he helped to found in the late 1940s, Politics and Letters and The
Critic, as well as his first major study, Reading and Criticism (1950). Drawing
attention to the pervasive influence of Eliot (rather than Leavis, as is commonly
assumed), it argues that the tensions between literary and Marxist analysis which
Williams found so crippling in this early period in fact provided the motor of his
development as a whole. Chapter 2 argues for the formative (rather than
marginal) role usually assigned to Williams's early thinking on drama, and
examines neglected works such as Drama from Ibsen to Eliot (1952), the first
version of Drama in Performance (1954), and the book co-written with
Michael Orrom, Preface to Film (1954). The third chapter focuses on the
largely neglected context of cultural, educational and political debate from
which Culture and Society and The Long Revolution emerged, while Chapter 4
concentrates on the significant detail of Williams's oppositional relation to
'Cambridge English' in his books Modern Tragedy (1966), The English Novel
from Dickens to Lawrence (1970), and The Country and the City (1973), and the
way these studies also carried on his critical dialogue with Marxism. Chapter 6
investigates the ways in which cultural materialism is offered as the theoretical
alternative to existing formations of English studies, while Chapter 7 examines
the final, interrupted, stage of Williams's argument with 'official culture'
through his renewed attention to the ideological and disciplinary forces at work
the related formations of modernism and English studies, both in their
historical trajectory and in terms of their contemporary theoretical assessment
and practice.
The guiding principle of this study is that Williams's engagement with
English studies cannot be understood in terms purely internal to the discipline
of English. As well as writing against the official culture of liberal and
conservative literary studies, he also wrote in opposition to what he read as the
orthodoxies of Marxist thinking on literature, culture and politics. Arguing first
against Marxist literary criticism as he knew it from the 1930s, he maintained an
ever-sceptical and ever-critical stance towards the later trends of Althusserian
 Introduction 3
and post-structuralist theory, while at the same time continuing his always
defining commitment to socialist politics. While the terms of this larger
argument are necessarily present throughout, Chapter 5 focuses on them more
narrowly, and traces their development in Williams's thinking from the late
1950s through the development of the concept of cultural materialism in
Marxism and Literature in 1977.
Similarly, no one can read Williams's work without becoming aware just how
far its concerns reach beyond the bounds of the academy and extend the usual
confines of a professional academic identity. The single most striking character-
istic of his work is its commitment to the connection of literary argument and
debate with the broader issues of politics and society. This account seeks to
foreground some of the ways in which it always interacted with the cultural and
political debates of his day. He was never just an academic, but always, to
borrow Edward Said's terms, a public and fully secular intellectual. 6 The study
closes with an examination of the difficult dynamics of settling Williams's
intellectual legacy in the decade since his death?
I make no claim to cover every aspect of the extraordinary range of Wil-
liams's writing and thinking. Conspicuously absent are any assessment of his
own fictional and dramatic writing, which was so deeply and interestingly
connected to his academic work; any substantial account of his specifically
political ideas and activities, or even a full engagement with his important work
on television and mass communication; Chapter 3 focuses on Culture and
Society at the expense of The Long Revolution. 8 The focus is narrow, but, I
hope, productive. While this study is not intended as a final word or judgement
on Williams's work as a whole, it is iptended as a counter to some of the 'final
words' that have been offered, to my mind prematurely. For there seems to be
an implicit (and at times explicit) judgement in some recent accounts that 'we
can now only read Williams's work historically', as if its relevance has dissi-
pated. 9 My own feeling is that reading Williams historically - as is attempted
here - can be a salutary challenge to any tendency on our own parts to either
theoretical or political complacency. This study therefore presents an account
and analysis of the interaction in his thinking between the principled opposition
to and questioning of both Marxist cultural theory and Cambridge literary
criticism across some forty years of academic writing and debate.
I The tight place
Marxism or literature? 1947-50

Raymond Williams's first critical writings - from, for example, the essays and
reviews in Politics and Letters (1947-8) to Preface to Film (1954) - have been
powerfully characterised as 'left-Leavisite'. Perhaps in consequence, they have
been too little read. As Williams himself noted in The Long Revolution,
sometimes the very availability of a description and the ascription of a name can
work to block fully historical analysis (Williams 1961a: 89-90). The aim of the
first two chapters of this study is to prise open some of the internal complexities
and contradictions that the label 'left-Leavisite' works to contain, and to
provide a more historically nuanced account and assessment of the early
criticism than is generally available. In so doing, I shall challenge the dominant
view that this early period is best viewed as a merely probationary, and easily
superseded, moment in Williams's formation. I argue that, duly considered, the
early work presents us with the constitutive dynamic of his intellectual identity.
This first chapter examines the uneasy development of his thought from the
autumn of 1939, when he began his undergraduate studies in English at
Cambridge University, through the first years of his work as staff tutor for the
Oxford University Tutorial Committee, to the publication of his first book,
Reading and Criticism, in 1950.
Terry Eagleton, probably Williams's single most extensive critic, proposed
the term 'left-Leavisite' in his provocative and polemical assessment of
Williams's work, first published as an essay New Left Review and then as the
opening chapter of his Criticism and Ideology, both 1976. Of course, others
had remarked on the importance to Williams of his formation in the discipline
of English, but no one had done so with as much vigour as the self-consciously
iconoclastic Eagleton. 3 In Criticism and Ideology, 'left-Leavisism' figures as the
first of the three main stages an incomplete move towards a genuinely
Marxist criticism.
In an important but little-known interview with the Cambridge journal Red
Shift in 1977, Williams said that although he 'would accept much of
[Eagleton's] account', he was disturbed by some aspects of it. Questioned
about the contradictions of his own position and intellectual history, he
responded wryly: 'What I want to ask is who Eagleton is?'. He went on to argue
 The tight place 5
vigorously that the 'basic fault of the kind of formalist Marxism which Eagleton
is now in is that it assumes that by an act of intellectual abstraction you can
place yourself above the lived contradictions both of the society and of any
individual you choose to analyse, and that you are not yourself in question'.
Against this, he asserted that 'the belief that one is above that deeply contra-
dictory situation is a fantasy .... There is no position except in fantasy where one
can merely examine what others are inscribing' (Williams 1977b: 12,15).
A year later, in a discussion with New Left Review which was in part
prompted by Eagleton's essay, Williams had sharpened his response, and now
rejected 'the general label left-Leavisism' because it implied far too unified and
far too comfortable a position. Except in fantasy, 'left-Leavisism' could only be
an 'inherently unstable' position (Williams 1979: 195). As we shall see, what
was troubling was the way in which Eagleton's confidently theoretical
description glossed over instabilities and contradictions which had been felt very
deeply and very painfully, and which the writing itself had struggled but failed
to resolve.

The tight place

'The tight place, where you stick fast; there is no going forwards or backwards.'
Ibsen's words - from When We Dead Awaken - held a particular resonance for
Raymond Williams as he completed his undergraduate studies in Cambridge in
1946. 4 He quoted them in his fmal year dissertation on Ibsen (an essay which
later formed the basis for the first chapter of Drama from Ibsen to Eliot); and
some thirty years later, he recalled how that sense of being unable to move, of
being trapped, which he had found in Ibsen, seemed to sum up his own
intellectual and political predicament, his own troubled sense of self and
vocation. 'That was exactly my sensation. The theme of my analysis of Ibsen is
that although everybody is defeated in his work, the defeat never cancels the
validity of the impulse that moved him; yet that the defeat has occurred is also
crucial' (Williams 1979: 62-3).
What were the terms of this defeat? Why did the young Williams suffer from
such a sense of failure when, by all ordinary standards, he already appeared to
be an achiever, indeed a success? He had, after all, survived the war and come
through some of its bloodiest fighting in the Normandy and Ardennes
offensives. He had married in 1942, and he and his wife Joy had their first child
in 1944. He graduated from Cambridge with a first-class degree in English and
was offered a place to do research, but chose instead to become a tutor in the
burgeoning adult education movement. Between 1946 and 1953 he completed
three books, wrote most of a fourth, collaborated as editor of and contributor
to two new (though short-lived) journals, and at the same time worked through
the preliminary drafts and versions of his first novel. On the surface, Raymond
Williams in the late 1940s and early 1950s was already a successful academic
and intellectual. Why then this troubled sense of blockage and of failure?
6 The tight place
To understand this, we need to grasp something of the depth of Williams's
commitment, one which we can read in the terms he appropriated from Ibsen
as commitment to a vocation, and as a commitment always under threat of
failure. If we see his vocation as, in the first instance, that of a socialist literary
critic, then we can read that commitment as riven by a conflict between its two
main components. Literary criticism provided him with both something of an
intellectual base and the superstructure of a professional identity; but its
generally apolitical or even conservative stance was deeply unattractive to him,
as were its usually apolitical and ahistorical modes of analysis. In a sense, the
discourse of literary criticism was the 'tight place' in which Williams felt so
trapped. At this point, as we shall see, he was unable either to go back to the
Marxist literary criticism which he decisively abandoned - on professional
grounds - in the course of his undergraduate studies; but neither was he able to
move forwards beyond the terms of existing literary studies.
At the same time, we need to understand that it was just this sense of being
stuck which proved to be the necessary ground for Williams's major work. The
deep feelings of failure and defeat which dogged him in this early period
provided the necessary dynamic for a reworking not only of the possible
relationships between Marxism and literary studies, but for a significant revision
and recasting of both. This first chapter examines the constitutive tensions of
that 'tight place', of the young Williams caught unhappily between a literary
criticism he could not accept politically and a Marxism he could not reproduce
professionally. It was the extreme discomfort of this 'position' in this period
that proved to be the very motor and motive of his intellectual development.

Beginnings
In the autumn of 1939, Raymond Williams arrived at Trinity College
Cambridge to begin his studies for a BA degree in English literature. was the
beginning of a combative relationship with 'Cambridge English' which was to
structure and define the main contours of his intellectual identity. was to
shape the nature of his particular contribution to both Marxism and literary
studies that together form the focus of this account: that attention to the
politics of culture, and to the primacy of culture in politics, which he finally
came to name a 'cultural materialism'.
Unlike most students at Trinity, and indeed in the university as a whole,
Williams did not belong to the privileged elite who had received their secondary
education in one of Britain's so-called public schools. For these, three years
study at 'Oxbridge' was simply a stepping stone to an already established place
in the natural hierarchy of British society. 5 Instead, Williams 'came up' to
Cambridge as what was to become a familiar icon of 1950s culture, as a
'scholarship boy', one of a number of students from working-class families who
won a place in one of the prestige universities through the highly competitive
entrance examinations. 6
 The tight place 7
Born in the Welsh village of Pandy, and educated first at the local primary
school and then at King Henry VIII Grammar School for Boys four miles away
in Abergavenny, Williams arrived at Cambridge unwilling to be intimidated,
and, initially at least, with a sturdy self-confidence and political identity which
were the products of a deeply supportive family environment? Trinity had no
Fellow responsible for teaching English, so in the first year he was tutored by
Lionel Elvin and had his weekly discussions on Shakespeare and the literature of
the Renaissance at Trinity Hall. As a member of the Communist Party - which
he joined in December - he devoted a great deal of his time to the Cambridge
Socialist Club, writing for the Club Bulletin, participating in debates at the
Cambridge Union and, at the urging of the Communist Party, acting as editor
for the Cambridge University Journal. As a member of the ironically named
Aesthetes, Williams also showed a keen interest in film. Far from being the
alienated figure suggested by critics such as Jan Gorak, the young Williams
found a ready place in the active socialist life of the university: as he was later to
put it, 'I had to dine in Hall and the class stamp of Trinity at that time was not
difficult to spot. But it did not have to be negotiated as the only context at
Cambridge. The Socialist Club was a home from home' (Williams 1979: 40).8
Certainly the details of an average week's activities in the Club show the
fullness of its timetable. We might take the week-long period beginning
6 March 1940 as presenting an average week's activities in the Club:

Wednesday: 12.30 Hands Off Russia - Lobbying and Poster Parade

Friday: Hand's Off Russia - Meeting in The Dorothy
Saturday: 2.30 Film Club - Pabst's Westfront; 8.00 pm Social
Sunday: 2.00 Film Show; 4.30 Tea; 8.00 film
Monday: 8.00 pm Business Meeting
Tuesday: Union Debate - Intervention against the USSR
Wednesday: 8.00 pm -1.30 am Dance

In addition, there were three faculty group meetings for students in history,
physics and English. Williams gave a short paper, 'Culture and the People', on
Friday 1 November 1940 which CUSBC reports was 'followed by keen
discussion providing enough questions to keep the group going for the rest of
the year.,9
And yet a notable feature of the later Culture and Society was its hostile
chapter on the Marxist literary criticism which was the staple diet of young
socialists like the undergraduate Williams. The 'home from home' was to be
repudiated. Chapter 5 of Part 3 - 'Marxism and Culture' - is the only place in
Culture and Society where the famously balanced and objective tone of the
book breaks down, most obviously in its notorious judgement on Caudwell,
whose writing is described with contempt as 'not even specific enough to be
wrong' (Williams 1958a: 277). The 1930s had seen the publication of a
number of works which became standard reading for socialist students of
literature: in 1937 alone, Alick West's Crisis and Criticism, Ralph Fox's The
8 The tight place
Novel and the People, Christopher Caudwell's Illusion and Reality, and the Day-
Lewis collection, The Mind in Chains, all appeared. These were all the targets of
Williams's sharpest criticism. What it is important to recognise, and what is in
any case evident from the angry tone of the account, is that it was just these
works which formed the initial basis for his literary analyses as he worked for
Part One of the English Tripos. The savageness of his later criticism should alert
us to the existence of what he was later to acknowledge as a painful - and
determinant - break with these available forms of Marxist literary analysis under
the pressures of the availability of the techniques and skills of Cambridge
English. That this break was to be the very condition for the formation of
Williams's own distinctive version of literary and cultural studies is relatively
easy to see in hindsight. did not and could not appear to be anything so
promising at the time.

Impasse
The first cracks began to appear in the second year of his studies at Cambridge,
when he moved from Elvin's sympathetic supervision to a more challenging
encounter with E.M.W. Tillyard at Jesus College. iO Tillyard - one of the first
lecturers to be appointed to teach the new Cambridge degree in the 1920s, and
the pioneer of studies in the historical 'background' of English literature that
Williams was later to attack with regularity - raised a number of questions
which the young Williams was unable to answer.
The second year of the English Tripos focused on the history of the novel
and Romantic poetry. In his tutorials with Tillyard, Williams sought to apply
the stock responses of the 1930s Marxist criticism he had been reading. In this
'proleptic criticism', the literature of the present and of the past is read and
evaluated in terms of future needs. In his introduction to The Mind in Chains
(1937), the poet Cecil Day-Lewis repeated with approval Edward Upward's
contention that 'the most enduring books are those in which the writer has
seen so deeply into contemporary reality that he has exposed "the shape of
things to come" latent there' (Day-Lewis 1937a: 16). Upward himself argued
that for the Marxist 'a good book is one that is true to life .... For the Marxist
critic, therefore, a good book is one that is true not merely to temporary
existing situations but also to the future conditions which are developing within
that situation' (Day-Lewis 1937: 46). In the same vein, Ralph Fox, in his The
Novel and the People, also stresses the need for a new Marxist realism:

The new realism it is our task to create must take up the task where bour-
geois realism laid it down. It must show man not merely critical, or man at
hopeless war with a society he cannot fit into as an individual, but man in
action to change his conditions, to master life, man in harmony with the
course of history and able to become the lord of his own destiny.
(Fox 1937: 100)
 The tight place 9
In this view, novels of the past should be judged in terms of how novels should
be written in the present; Romantic poetry represented an unfinished project of
human liberationY Tillyard's reply to this was apparently blunt and forceful:
'He told me this was not a tenable procedure; it was a fantasy' (Williams 1979:
52). Williams found the encounter very stressful:

I was engaged in having to satisfY somebody who was professionally

teaching a subject that my ideas were tenable and reasonable, and I could
not. I was continually found out in ignorance, found out in confusion ....
You must remember that a hell of a lot of my self-image was devoted to
the notion that I could handle academic work. now became clear to me
that I could not.
(Williams 1979: 51)

What was at stake were the very terms of his developing sense of a self and a
vocation, and it is significant that he later remembered his call-up and entry into
the army in July of 1941 as something of a relief, as a temporary way out of the
tight place he had found himself in.
But only temporary. Williams spent the next four years in the army, but was
given the early release available to university students who had interrupted their
studies to take part in the war. He returned to Cambridge in the autumn of
1945 and went on to complete the third year of the Tripos with a special paper
on George Eliot and a 15,000 word essay on Ibsen. In both of these areas of
work, he remained troubled by the arguments raised by Tillyard, arguments he
still felt unable to resolve. He felt he had reached an impasse, one in which a
major part of his own sense of self-identity and self-esteem was at stake: his
professional identity as a literary scholar. In this crisis, we can recognise what
was to become a central and defming characteristic of his work: its unusual
biographical impetus, its powerful sense of an integrity and focus located in the
personal voicing of the academic.
The feeling of impasse is crucial to an understanding of the forces which
drove Williams in his attempt to forge a new way of doing literary studies. By
his return to Cambridge in 1945, he had rejected the available forms of Marxist
literary criticism. At the university, the energies of the Socialist Club had waned,
though Williams found society and stimulus with two new friends, Henry
Collins and Wolf Mankowitz, both enthusiastic Leavisites. Together, the three
were keen to promote left-wing literary and cultural criticism which, while it
accepted the Leavisite criticism of Marxist literary analysis, refused their
rejection of politics.

Politics and Letters

In an early review, Williams repeats the standard Leavisite line, and writes of the
failure of Marxist literary criticism to 'emerge from theory into respectable
practice' (1947b: 52). The practice in question was literary criticism, and the
10 The tight place
first attempt to force such an emergence came with the founding of the journal
Politics and Letters in 1947. Williams put the journal together with the help of
his two Cambridge friends, Wolf Mankowitz and Henry Collins. Its contribu-
tors, over its short lifespan, included Jean-Paul Sartre, George Orwell,
Christopher Hill and F.R. Leavis. A 'complementary' journal- one more purely
concerned with the 'literary', The Critic - also began at the same time, but was
amalgamated with Politics and Letters after the second issue. Politics and Letters
itself ran for four issues before it collapsed in 1948.
As Williams was later to put it, the journal signalled an attempt to 'unite a
radical left politics with Leavisite literary criticism. We were to be to the left of
the Labour Party, but at a distance from the CPo Our affiliation to Scrutiny was
guarded, but it was none the less quite a strong one' (Williams 1979: 65). This
is the position now generally known as 'left-Leavisism', though the term is
rejected by Williams for implying too unitary and too static a position.
Politics and Letters defined itself in opposition to three currents of thought.
First of all, it was directed against the failed Marxist literary theory of the 1930s;
second, it rejected the (a)political stance of Leavis's Scrutiny, by now the key
journal in literary studies; and third, it was set against what was seen as the self-
conscious metropolitanism and self-indulgent aestheticism of Cyril Connolly's
Horizon (1940-9). It was here that, in April 1947, Connolly saw fit to declare
that 'the honeymoon between literature and action .. .is over ... the left-wing
literary movement has petered out'.12 In positive terms, Politics and Letters was
intended as the spearhead of political activism in the adult education movement
and sought to ensure that the Labour government did not ignore the
importance of cultural politics in the struggle for working class emancipation
and the achievement of a participatory democracy.13
The very title of its first editorial - 'For Continuity in Change' - embodied
the difficult reliance on and yet combative relation to Leavisism in its repetition
and adjustment to the title of Leavis's most polemical collection of essays, For
Continuity (first published by the Minority Press in Cambridge in 1933). The
editorial chose the literary scandal of 1946 known as the Zoschenko debate as
the grounds of the journal's first public intervention. The central argument was
that the usual 'dichotomy between politics and letters' - exemplified in Leavis's
writing of the period, and in the pro- and anti-Marxist stances of Modern
Quarterly and Horizon, respectively - needs to be challenged. A proper
understanding of the issues involved in the Soviet literary debate shows why this
challenge is necessary. For Williams and his co-editors, both Marxists and anti-
Marxists miss what Leavis had grasped: the 'real nature' of literature. The
Horizon moralists miss the 'detailed experience of living' which literature
embodies, and are therefore unable to prevent their 'values' from being too
abstract, or worse, too self-indulgent. The ideologues of the Modern Quarterly
are blind to the very existence of a professional literary criticism whose tools and
methods should be brought to bear in any cultural debate. Against these
positions, the editors suggest the following:
 The tight place 11
What is valid, and in our opinion supremely important, is that the structure
of society, its institutions and directions, should be constantly assessed by
standards resting on certain immediate qualities of living, qualities which
social history scarcely records, but which, 'for continuity', our cultural
tradition embodies.
(Williams et al. 1947a: 3-4)

'Embodies' is the key term. articulates the journal's debt to the

'Cambridge English' of the Scrutiny school, where literature is not merely a
record of past experience; it is the still living embodiment of that experience.
According to the metaphysics of this school, the literary critic enjoys a highly
privileged relation to history; somehow, through the experience of reading
literary texts, the critic can re-experience the structure and specificity of any
historical moment. Hence the idea - first put forward by LA. Richards, and
later taken up by F.R. Leavis - that the 'standard of living' of a society could
best be judged - indeed, could only be judged - by the literary critic. The
editors of Politics and Letters allowed this same centrality to the critic, but went
on to point out that the critic needs to be concerned with more than the
understanding ofliterature alone.
There were then two primary tasks for the journal: the creation of 'an
intelligent reading public', and the creation of a group which could and would
intervene politically. The problem was, of course, that there was no necessary
connection between the two groups, any more than there was a necessary
connection between the two journals originally imagined as 'complementary'.
Despite the desire to go beyond Scrutiny's apolitical stance, Politics and Letters
remained, in the end, trapped by its inadequate conceptualisation of politics. As
the second editorial, 'Culture and Crisis', put it, in the rather desperate terms
which signalled the journal's imminent collapse:

The critic stands subject to two autonomies: that of planning for material
survival and prosperity (it is an estimate we must make objectively and with
the methods of science); and that of allowing for and fostering responsibility
in society, an effort in which we are supported by that evidence there is of
human maturity, by tradition evidenced by literature and social history, by
experience. We have at present to make separate estimates of these prob-
lems remembering that as literary critics we have training to aid us in the
latter, while in politics we are undoubtedly naive.
(Williams et al. 1947b: 7)

Subject to two autonomies, trained in one and yet naive in the other, it is hardly
surprising that Politics and Letters could only reproduce in the end the tight
place of Williams's frustrations.
Williams contributed some thirteen essays and reviews to the two journals
and these reflect his interests and preoccupations of the time. IS His single most
important essay was 'Soviet Literary Controversy in Retrospect', published in
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