F. R. Leavis by Anne Samson (review)

168 LETTERS IN CANADA 1992 occult. Nietzsche's discussiqns of secret societies and Dionysian rites in The Birth of Tragedy and The Genealogy of Morals were popularized by Edouard Schure and Josephin Peladan and transmitted into Symbolisme and modernism. The Nietzsche of the modernists, Surette explains, is not the sceptical relativist of poststructuralism, but the proponent of myth, mystical gnosis, and secret genealogies of 'blond beasts.' In his final chapter, on Pound's editing of The Waste Land, Surette maintains that Eliot solicited Pound precisely for his expertise in occultism. Pound proceeded to foreground the poem's pessimism by reducing 'the palingenetic and erotic representations of transcendence that Eliot seems to have adapted from {Jessie] Weston's characterization of the ancient initiation rites in Ritual to Romance.' More provocative is Surette's contention that the poem's debt to Weston was meant, not as a 'straight' incorporation of occult materials, but as an ironic 'symptom of the spiritual decay that Eliot's poem ... evokes and bemoans.' Although familiar with the occult, Eliot emerges, not surprisingly, as a more cautious figure than either Pound or Yeats. The occult is a difficult concept to define (Surette regards it as a less mediated, less institutionalized, less communicable form of religious experience), and it often threatens to open into too capacious a category. Indeed, in his conclusion Surette comes close to defining the occult simply as the antithesis of Enlightenment reason. As a contribution to literary history, however, Surette's study demonstrates that modernist scepticism was primarily local (more precisely, religious) and yielded to an easy credulity before matters occult. He is therefore able to respect that rather conspicuous modernist amalgam of scepticism and absolutism, in which the rejection of inherited belief systems coexisted with a powerful retrenching behind personal, albeit idiosyncratic, convictions. Surette compellingly demonstrates that these convictions were, if not directly influenced by occultism, at least formed in a milieu rife with occult tenets and beliefs. Indeed, any attempt to advance one-sided accounts of modernism's 'scepticism and relativism' must now face the not unformidable task of contending wit11 The Birth of Modernism. (PAUL ENDO) Anne Samson. F.R. Leavis University of Toronto Press. 196. $16.95 paper Anne Samson's study of P.R. Leavis is part of a series on modem cultural theorists and as such lays particular emphasis on the social and cultural aspects of Leavis's work. Moreover, as Samson informs us: 'My interest now lies not so much in literary criticism as in that area where it intersects with philosophy and cultural history.' Given Leavis's fierce defence of literary criticism as a separate and distinct discipline, one HUMANITIES 169 might begin to wonder how sympathetic an approach like Salnson's could be, and sure enough much of her disagreement with and critique of Leavis has to do with the nature of his alleged Itheory.' Further, Samson acknowledges that she has moved away from Leavis's beliefs - frankly, it is hard to imagine she ever shared them - and the ultimate basis of her finally unsympathetic view of Leavis is her differing set of 'beliefs.' Apparently, she has the 'true' set of beliefs on a number of matters, but especially on 'reality.' Samson's aim is to provide a general overview of Leavis's work and to identify what she regards as contradictions and paradoxes in his work in particular in his ideas about rootedness, standards, and reality. She does manage to raise some interesting questions about Leavis's work, especially about the way certain of his concepts and terms do or do not hang together, and about the extent to which favourite Leavis terms, such as 'embody,' 'enact,' 'realize,' and 'concreteness,' merely represent a critical position rather than a touchstone of reality. There is much to be said for her argument that 'it is by his rhetorical embrace of the concrete and the specific that Leavis's generalisations are given weight and take on the appearance of forming a coherent position.' And in at least one place, in her discussion of Leavis on Shelley, she provides a fine account of the delicate balancing of literary criticism and moral judgment in Leavis's work. Nonetheless, I find...