The Country and the City

REVIEWS THE COUNTRY AND THE CITY' This is an important book. A positive judgment needs to be communicated at the outset, since the disagreements and irritations which Raymond Williams's argument inevitably and properly provokes are always threatening to divert attention from the originality of his approach and the brilliance of so many of his individual insights. The scope of the book is enormous - no less than the cultural interrelations of country and city through four centuries of English experience as they are manifested in literature and social commentary, together with a continuing critique of the resultant myths, assumptions, and conventions . Yet this account conveys the wrong impression if it suggests a dryly academic study. The Country and the City is acutely personal in a double sense - first because it is thoroughly committed to a particular ideology, second because Williams does not Hinch from introducing his own early history and family recollections as elements in his argument. As a consequence, the opening chapter of his book, in which he tells of his personal transplanting from a working-class background in a remote Welsh village to a university city, and tries to assess its effect upon his approach and attitudes, is sincerely and deeply moving to an extent unprecedented in a" work of traditional scholarship. This makes critical reviewing an unusually delicate operation, since here, even more than in scholarly writing, contemporary fashion favours an objective, impersonal approach. But in this case such a tactic would be both irrelevant and impertinent. Williams's stress on the importance of perspective is convincing , and personal perspective - the influence of one's own upbringing upon one's tastes and assumptions - is too dominant a factor in evaluation to be ignored. Williams has laid his own cards openly on the table; any responsible reviewer is obliged to do the same. I must state, then, that my own origins are lower-middle-class suburban. I have experienced with Williams, though in a later generation, both the stimulus and the personal pressures of an educational process that expanded my consciousness while at the same time tending to separate me painfully from the interests and pursuits of my family and its immediate circle; my own transplanting to a university city has even involved a change of countries and all the strains of adaptation and reappraisal that go with it. I can claim, I think, to be reasonably well-informed on various aspects of the English rural scene (l must admit a greater interest in"the Icountry' half of Williams's subject), though I came to it as an outsider lacking the rooted experience of the country-born. My literary interests have led me to·Raymond Williams, The Country and the City. London: Chatto & Windus 1973. Pp. 335. $11.25 UTQ, Volume XLIll, Number 2, Winter 1974 170 W.J.KEITH read and study most of the writers that Williams discusses, and I share with him the regret that in so many instances their significance passes unrecognized by traditional curricula in schools and universities. Finally - and I honestly do not know the extent to which this is affected by the above circumstances - my political convictions, though profoundly opposed to many aspects of the western capitalist status quo, are far removed from Williams's unequivocal position on the radical left. For anyone who has not read The Country and the City these confessions may well sound ludicrous; for anyone who has they will be recognized, I hope, as essential. The fact is that Williams has knocked an extensive hole in the venerable protective wall that attempts to shelter literary and humanistic studies from the buffetings of sociopolitical winds. He rejects the very concept of a 'pure' literary criticism; he writes not merely as a scholar replete with abstract ideas and perceptions, but as a whole man, aware that his intellectual judgments cannot be separated from the intricate system of individual responses that we vaguely and inadequately describe as 'feelings.' In this book Williams has spoken out. Many will disagree with him, but they cannot afford to evade his challenge. We must try to be honest not only with the subject but with ourselves. I know that in offering my own...