OXFORD ENGLISH IN THE SIXTIES

1 4 Y O X F O R D E N G L I S H I N T H E S I X T I E S A L A S T A I R F O W L E R F. W. Bateson is commonly thought of as the compiler of the fivevolume Cambridge Bibliography of English Literature (1941–77), but his achievement was much more than that. As perhaps the only Oxford tutor of his generation who grasped the full scope of literary criticism, he is of incalculable local importance. He had been a Commonwealth Fellow at Harvard in the late twenties and observed the rise of the New Critics – Cleanth Brooks and W. K. Wimsatt, Allen Tate and John Crowe Ransom – whose ‘‘close reading’’ superseded the scholarly tracking of sources, influences, and historical contexts. The New Critics’ habit of drawing moral and political conclusions directly from the self-contained literary work seemed to many unsound; Bateson returned to Oxford with strong reservations about them. During World War II, Bateson had been a statistical o≈cer in local government, well accustomed to navigating oceans of print. He was one of the few tutors who had worked outside academia. After the war he made himself au fait with European and American developments in criticism, omnivorously reading literature and its contexts. Used to keeping many strands in play, he made himself a contextualist in a new sense. 1 5 R Visitors to Bateson’s house in the hilltop village of Brill might find many signs of his diverse interests. Taking the sun at his open door, behind him a Victorian elephant on wheels, by his side his wife, Jan, pacifying wasps with a jar of jam and water, he would explain how Brill had served as an observation post during the siege of Oxford in the English Civil War. Or as the doyen of local historians, he might show visitors over the windmill. In the university, Bateson was a patron and an enabler. At the Critical Society he liked to air preposterous views until his gadfly provocations met humiliating rebuttals. The heated objections would turn his ruddy complexion blush-red. Once he applied Coleridge’s definition of poetry as ‘‘the best words in the best order’’ to T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets, rearranging lines to show their lack of inevitability. How much of this coat-trailing was mentoring, how much masochism? Bateson founded Essays in Criticism, a journal that still survives , still ignores critical fashion, still maintains a high level of scholarship. He conceded that F. R. Leavis’s Scrutiny was the better journal of criticism. But this betrays his tendency to overrate judicial criticism. Of the two journals, Scrutiny more often fell into dogmatism and loss of proportion. As general editor of the Longman [later Pearson] Annotated English Poets, Bateson dispensed significant patronage. By choosing beginners as editors – Christopher Ricks, for example, and John Carey – he changed their lives. What would Carey be without his editions of Milton’s shorter poems, or Ricks without his two Tennysons? Above all Bateson kept his editors up to the mark, giving them tutorials, in e√ect, on editing. Bateson’s essay ‘‘The Literary Artefact’’ made us aware of Fredson Bowers and modern bibliography. And Bateson himself brought contemporary American and European criticism to our notice by enabling us to meet U.S. critics. We had scarcely heard of genre theory before a visit by R. S. Crane, the Chicago theorist. Lionel Trilling, too, was brought into our orbit. No accident that Trilling was the most contextualist of the New Critics, as witness his Mansfield Park essay in Encounter (1954). Trilling had a better sense of historical context than to claim, as Wimsatt and Beardsley did, that ‘‘the history of words after a poem is written may contribute meanings which if relevant to the original pattern should not be ruled out by a scruple about intention.’’ 1 6 F O W L E R Y In the 1950s, European structuralism was a closed book to the Oxford English faculty: even R. A. Sayce’s seminars made little impression. Although Bateson was no believer in structuralism, he...