Amidst the complex and competing forces of literary modernism, political upheaval, military trauma and worldwide depression, the discipline of English experienced profound transformation in England between the wars. But apart from in Western Australia, the effects of this transformation, identified particularly with the work of the critic FR Leavis, would not be felt in force in Australia until the 1960s. As with idealist philosophy, there is no neat and pure method at work here, but rather competing schools of thought evident in pedagogy and criticism, as the influence of Leavisism arguably continues to be felt in public life and educational values in Australia.

During and after the Second World War, in the discipline of English in Australia, there was a distinct ‘changing of the guard’. The appointees of the 1910s and 1920s left the universities: Murdoch retired in 1939, Holme in 1940, Cowling in 1943 and AJA Waldock in 1950. JIM Stewart, who replaced AT Strong at Adelaide in 1934, returned to take up a senior lectureship in Ireland in 1946. The last of the group who span this period are JJ Stable, who retired from Queensland in 1952, and AB Taylor, who left Tasmania in 1957. This turnover preceded a period of rapid expansion of the tertiary sector which, in the 1950s and in particular the 1960s, enabled a group of much younger men, mainly Oxford graduates, to obtain chairs while still in their mid thirties. Many had few publications and little teaching experience. Members of this generation are distinguished from their predecessors (other than Robert Wallace) by having postgraduate training specifically in English literature, and by their tendency to restrict themselves to 180English rather than European literature or languages; most worked in isolation, too, from the now burgeoning and dynamic North American literary scholarship. In general they seem to have opted for conservative versions of the discipline, perhaps in the face of rapid social change that seemed to threaten what were now claimed as the traditions of English literary study.

To the extent that it is possible to generalise, many of this new generation can be associated with QD and FR Leavis, who in turn claimed to draw much of their missionary zeal from Matthew Arnold’s work. Others self-consciously adhered to what they saw as a more ‘scholastic’ tradition, deliberately eschewing what Chris Baldick has called ‘the social mission of English criticism’. Superficially, these competing critical and pedagogical modes are associated with the education in English literature received at Cambridge and Oxford respectively, and in Australia would come to be associated with Melbourne and Sydney respectively. (That said, postgraduate student destinations gradually began to diversify, assisted in part by the Commonwealth Postgraduate Scholarship scheme.) However the new pre-eminence of English also reflected the declining status of classical languages – the exception being Oxford, where more than half the academics were classicists – as well as the separation from English of the discipline of linguistics. Classics diminished in influence as Australian universities dropped the requirements of Greek, and then Latin for matriculation, evidence of the influence of schools, as well as the pressure to increase student numbers.

Eliot and Richards

In the face of what was, in the 1920s, widespread challenge to the value of the study of classics, TS Eliot offered one of the most influential arguments for the value of the past, and the role of the creative writer. Eliot argued for the reinvigoration of the classical ‘inheritance’, implicitly generalising from his arguments about the nature of the creative writer’s relationship to literary texts, to literary education. In some senses Eliot himself was an ‘outsider’, having been born in St Louis, Missouri, before studying at Harvard, thence Merton College Oxford, ultimately 181becoming not only an Anglican but a British subject (Drabble, 321). While the First World War was still in progress, and almost immediately after his arrival in England, he made a staggering claim to the European cultural inheritance: ‘It is the final perfection, the consummation of an American to become, not an Englishman, but a European – something which no born European, no person of any European nationality, can become’ (quoted in Baldick, The Social Mission, 111). Eliot’s move was towards a dramatic assimilation.

Renowned as a poet, editor and critic, Eliot offered a thoroughly conservative articulation of the relationship between past and present in literature in his essay ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’. In parallel with Macaulay’s Minute (for the nineteenth century), this fluent and persuasive piece is perhaps the most influential text in twentieth-century literary education in English-speaking countries, as well as countries in which literary education in English is significant, notably India. Eliot outlines a vision of historical order that implies both perpetual obligation and perpetual subordination to the past: creative writers are enjoined, in the words of Ezra Pound, to ‘make it new’.1 The paragraph from the essay that is quoted to support this view is always the same:

182The argument here rests on a metaphor of wholeness that purports to be diachronic, but is synchronic in its effect: it does not link past and present, but places of difference which must affiliate to the centre. However nonsensical to a historian, in its simplifying of the relationship of past to present, this set of claims illustrates Eliot’s view of the function of tradition: as an overwhelming force that individuals must acknowledge their subordination to.

Pierre Bourdieu uses the term habitus to describe that collection of behaviours and demeanours which become normative in an institutional environment. His description of this concept is strikingly similar to Eliot’s formulation of literary influence and innovation: ‘The habitus, embodied history, internalized as a second nature and so forgotten as history – is the active presence of the whole past of which it is the product’ (Logic of Practice, 56). What is crucial, here, is the forgetting of history, a history of what is often conflict and competition, which occurs after the time in which specific values or practices become normative. This forgetting of history accompanies the internalising of institutional behaviours as norms, thus these norms are regarded as timeless and authoritative.

Eliot’s prescription, and Bourdieu’s critique, are about a similar process: the subordination of critical judgement in the present to the authority of what is imagined as an ineluctable past. Thus the act of knowing that past is in one sense an expression of a different kind of obligation, arising from the belief that things need not be as they are. By contrast, Eliot’s claims take the authority of order for granted; what is significant for this history is that he should make those claims at precisely the time when that authority he declared eternal and right was under threat, not least and literally by war itself. 183

For Eliot, the past comes to seem timeless, eternal, universal, and ‘right’, in the moment that it is embodied in the speaker who respects it. Put simply, the great seduction of Eliot’s formulation is that it not only explains the relationship between a writer and literary history, it explains and helps to form a homologous relationship – based on an equivalent process of assimilation – between individuals and the institutions in which they become students, teachers and critics. For the colonial student at Oxford or Cambridge, for example, initiation into the great tradition is a process by which their own culture is set aside in favour of absorption of (and thereby into) an idealised Anglo-European cultural order. In Eliot’s formulation, this order is signified by a select group of literary texts. But texts are released from the historical conditions of their making, made meaningful instead by their place in a tradition, just as the work of the critic and teacher are made meaningful by their place in a larger mission. In an essay with a similar theme to ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’, ‘The Classics and the Man of Letters’, Eliot pointed explicitly to the Eurocentric nature of his understanding of the term ‘culture’:

Notwithstanding its magisterial tone, then, this essay, like Macaulay’s Minute, is a deeply polemical one: a strident intervention in debates about the meaning and uses of classics. But modern readers are not always encouraged to ask why it might have seemed necessary to Eliot to make such arguments at the time; instead, the essay is read as exactly that timeless truth it advocates belief in. Indeed, to put such a question about historical context is to refuse the obedience Eliot demands: there is a single order of value, making context irrelevant. But Eliot’s essay could be used to provide a kind of logic to chronological 184study, a logic that was more compelling than that provided by the likes of Austin Dobson.

Another important but radically different influence on literary study developed in this period was the work of IA Richards. Richards is identified with ‘practical criticism’, evaluation of a text through close reading. Richards had attended Clifton College and then went to Cambridge, where he studied moral sciences before being appointed to teach in the newly created school of English immediately after the end of the First World War. His major publications, Principles of Literary Criticism (1924) and Practical Criticism (1929), were highly influential because they were – or seemed to be – the first works to outline a teachable method of reading literature that was not strictly historical. Practical criticism aimed to develop students’ ability to discern good from bad, the great from the merely sentimental, teaching and testing by using texts whose author’s name was not disclosed.

In some respects, of course, this reflects a return to the notion of the intrinsic value of texts, but Richards’ methods were informed by the new discipline of psychology, and had the particular advantage of being brilliantly suited to examination. Again, though, we can see a lack of setting out of the relationship between the intellectual basis of an argument (that students should be able to discern great literature from the banal) and the pedagogical methods such a belief seemed to presume (how was this to be done?). In fact, because the most admired scholarship is just that – based on research – the work of implementing a teaching program usually comes after ideas have become orthodox. As a modern example, after ‘theory’ hit in the 1970s and 1980s, institutions tended to respond by developing ‘theory subjects’ which taught a different school of criticism each week, rather than rethinking the premises of each subject along theoretical lines. We might more logically look to institutional and cultural conditions to explain the emergence and popularity of Richard’s ideas, and indeed, they can be seen as responding to quite specific and urgent needs: to establish and maintain the cultural authority of English texts by developing a rigorous testing regime which could operate on a mass scale. 185

Richards’ influence was particularly strong in the United States, in part because of the success of his student William Empson, in part because Richards himself took up a position at Harvard in 1931, remaining there until 1963. Along with Empson, American critics associated with New Criticism such as Cleanth Brookes, Robert Penn Warren, John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate and WK Wimsatt, as well as Richards himself, were widely read and taught in Australia. The terms of the new critical vocabulary became the coins in the Christmas pudding that was the literary text: students searched for ‘irony’, ‘ambiguity’, ‘metaphor’ and ‘metonymy’, and were amply rewarded for finding it.2 Among key concepts are ‘the intentional fallacy’ – the belief that it is possible to answer questions about meaning by uncovering the author’s intention – and ‘the pathetic fallacy’, the view that literary characters can be judged as living beings (see Wimsatt and Beardsley). The influences of practical criticism and of the New Critics were especially appropriate to the teaching of poetry because, as has often been observed, it takes about an hour of ‘close reading’ to ‘do’ a short but complex poem in a tutorial, identifying and explaining the effect of particular rhetorical devices. To that one can add that this focus on the formal elements of a text to the exclusion of questions of context has the considerable advantage for teachers in requiring minimal preparation.

In his early and influential writings on literature, criticism, education and culture FR Leavis drew heavily from Eliot’s work; he is also often identified with New Criticism (a later development). In his most famous works of criticism, books like The Common Pursuit, The Great Tradition and Revaluation, Leavis boldly sought to reconfigure the English canon, and his views were consolidated by supporters who contributed to an essay series published in Scrutiny under the deliberately provocative title ‘Revaluations’. The task was to sort the great from the merely good, or worse, the great from the fraud. And certainly the influence was widespread in Australia. I like to imagine that there was a real frisson opening the new issue of the Leavis flagship, the journal Scrutiny:

186what if your favourite author, featured in your honours subject, had suddenly lost favour? If someone you had denounced as a fraud were declared a great? Surely this must have happened, for every Australian university teaching in the period the journal was published, except New South Wales (then a university of technology), hold complete sets. The National Library in Canberra purchased the 1963 reprint; a further reprint was issued in 2008, a measure not just of historical significance but of ongoing influence.

For Leavis and his associates the concern was not so much with creative writing (as it was for TS Eliot), nor with tools for judgement (as for Richards) or interpretation (as for the New Critics), however important these things could come to be for teachers who embraced the Leavisite approach. Although Leavis was regarded almost universally as a brilliant reader of literary texts, and a subscription to Scrutiny de rigueur for any self-respecting young Turk, it was perhaps primarily in the area of curriculum and pedagogy that Leavis and his followers were to have the greatest influence. Leavis was distinctive in his interest in schools and teacher training (see for example his Education and the University), echoing the concern with worker education and the extension movement that had been so important to Green, and to early generations of tertiary teachers of English. Thus Leavisism also had a strong impact in high schools and in what were then called teachers’ colleges.

Like almost every critical movement – we can recall Murdoch’s laconic reformulation of idealism as ‘le vrai, le beau, & le bien’ – Leavisite criticism is fairly easily condensed and simplified, whether by admirers or by antagonists. While only a handful of critics in Australia chose to attack Leavis directly, most dipped their lid to the leader before expressing hostility towards followers, who were generally characterised as simplistic evangelists who had forgotten the imperatives of scholarship because of their obsession with moral development. Nevertheless, it was not least this capacity to be simplified that made Leavisite criticism the single most influential force in the discipline of English in the twentieth century. More than any other intellectual mode it offered its adherents a rationale that could span both pedagogy and criticism; it gave clarity, 187force and high moral purpose to the work of teaching English; and perhaps for that reason, it was attractive to intense personalities who in turn devoted their lives to ensuring its success. For Leavis believed that the universities – both of them – had a central role to play in preserving and maintaining culture.3 Cambridge, like Oxford, was

For Leavis and for Leavisites, teachers of English had a special responsibility to revivify an idealised Elizabethan England, a cultural ‘option’ available to a particular class who could be defined not by inheritance but by education. As Alan Sinfield explains, the Leavises had insisted that ‘literary appreciation was not a class accomplishment but an individual attainment’; consequently, a literary text was ‘presented as a universal culture, detached from the class faction that had produced and sponsored it, and [mastery of which was] then used as a criterion for entry to a different faction (Literature, 55).

Leavisite criticism seemed to offer social mobility for lower middle-class and colonial students; in the view of Hans Gadamer in Wahrheit und Methode, the rise of ‘taste’ as an ideal in Europe was entwined with a loss of faith in and influence of not only the aristocracy, but the classics.

188The Leavisite revolution was not to invent the moral dimension of the study of literature, as is sometimes claimed, but to re-present that moral mission within narratives about class mobility and personal transformation that made sense not only to policy makers and administrators, but to students, particularly those seeking tertiary education for the first time in their family. These narratives drive literature itself, including plays like Educating Rita – in this kind of story, Rita must be studying English literature; the plot, which revolves around personal transformation, does not work if she is studying mathematics. The genius of the Leavises lay in making the appreciation of literature and the transformation of personal taste the foundation of pedagogy and testing, in a way that one senses the followers of Green had struggled to do. Crucially, this mission was articulated as a national one. In his ‘Retrospect’ on the journal Scrutiny, Leavis modestly noted that those who worked in the journal recognised

Leavis’ claim to have been ‘radically anti-academic’ is code for Oxford – although he presents the enterprise as antagonistic to the Cambridge hierarchy – but ironically it might also be understood as invoking the Oxford revolution of the mid-nineteenth century which was regarded at the time as ‘radically anti-academic’. Both movements aimed to give a moral mission to humanities, and sought, above all, to insert graduates into educational institutions where they might cultivate believers.

Like Jowett’s own pedagogy, the Leavisite mission was intensely imperialist, and curiously sexualised. There is a constant emphasis on virility, on the ‘manliness’ and ‘muscularity’ of chosen writers’ work, at odds with the demand for readers to be ‘sensitive’ – the contradiction 189evident in AA Phillips’ description of Ian Maxwell. The emphasis on masculinity helped to obscure the degree to which reading itself could be implicitly feminising; there was also an overt antagonism to the homosocial worlds exemplified by Bloomsbury and the earlier Aesthetes (Sinfield, Literature, 79). That Leavisite criticism was a crusade against Wilde, Woolf and others was emphasised, albeit euphemistically, by Lionel Trilling, in his essay ‘Dr Leavis and the Moral Tradition’:

Leavisite criticism provided a rationale for the study of English that could easily be fitted to flourishing pronouncements on policy – the rhetoric of standards, the valorisation of the text, and veneration of the teacher as arbiter of taste. It also destroyed the reputation of some creative writers. More neutral, but less often remarked upon, is that it brought a specific literary form, the novel, not merely to prominence but to pre-eminence. A measure of the moment’s simplicity and self-confidence is that the basic tenets of Leavisite thought meshed perfectly with patriotic sentiment, unlike the critical idealism, the classicism, and the cosmopolitanism (in intellectual and literary tastes) which it so dramatically challenged. This is why critics like AT Strong, passionate imperialists but classical scholars to their toenails, were less than enthusiastic about the nationalist push in the teaching of English that followed the end of the First World War. This push was most clearly manifested in the publication of the ‘Newbolt Report’ on The Teaching

190of English in England and George Sampson’s English for the English, both of which strongly advocated the teaching of English to encourage nationalism. Leavisite criticism, as has often been said, worked to answer the challenge raised by these two books.

In colonial environments, the authority of the Leavises and their colleagues was textual: few in Australia had worked with or even met them. In these circumstances the authors and their work were more able to retain their textual magic, theirs the authority of the printed word. Equally, the legibility of Leavisite critics within specifically English debates about relations between literature, culture, and the nation was almost certainly diminished for readers who were not in England. The colonial student/academic could read essays and reviews in Scrutiny, and Leavisite criticism, generally not in terms of their place within a debate in England about the uses of the national literature, but as evidence of the universal value of that literature. Of all those who subsequently held chairs of English in Australia only Allan Edwards, head of English at the University of Western Australia, had encountered the decidedly marginal Leavis of the interwar period, thence can be identified with the ‘dissident’ movement that Leavis claimed to have inaugurated. Later disciples who went to England in the 1950s encountered him as the patriarch of English studies.

Perth to Melbourne

After the retirement of Walter Murdoch, Edwards held the chair of English at UWA from 1941 to 1974. It is likely that the opinion of Alec King, Murdoch’s son-in-law, who was also an admirer of Leavis, was important in the decision to appoint him.5 David Bradley, in an obituary, suggested that after his arrival Edwards turned Murdoch’s ‘Oxford’ department into a ‘Cambridge’ one, but it is a measure of the speed with which literature came to dominate language study that Bradley could regard Murdoch’s curriculum, which was sometimes thought lightweight (see Alexander, and discussion above), as unduly scholastic.

191Born in 1909 in England, Edwards died in Perth in 1995, having come to Western Australia from Cape Town. He was reputedly ‘a stunning student at Cambridge; a pupil of IA Richards and of FR Leavis [who] thought him the brightest student he had ever taught’ (David Bradley).

The astonishing self-confidence which characterises Leavisite criticism is evident in Edwards’ early work, in particular – although by no means are other kinds of scholarship necessarily inclined to modesty. The arrogance that is a product of method and milieu is crucial to authority, as Paige Porter has argued:

In Edwards’ reviews, written when he was still in his mid twenties, almost every sentence pronounces a judgement on the adequacy of the creative writer’s enterprise.

The certainty is evident in his essay on John Webster that was the very first of the Scrutiny ‘Revaluations’. Edwards attempted to move Webster several steps down the literary league ladder, beginning his essay with the kind of uncompromising declaration of taste that marked so many contributions to Scrutiny:

This certainty could be regarded as a failure of scholarship, but Leavis and his followers believed it was precisely such uncompromising expressions of opinion that would energise English as a discipline – a view proven correct.

192Allan Edwards’ presence in the west prompted debates about the teaching of English, conducted in the departmental journal Westerly. The first shot, in print at least, was fired by a moral philosopher, Julius Kovesi (whose brother Paul was a member of the English department). Kovesi called for dialogue between English and philosophy, and attacked the work of IA Richards. His essay was answered by two stern letters, one from Edwards and one from Frank Gibbon, both accusing Kovesi of ignorance of literary criticism; Edwards also defended the work of Eliot and Leavis, notwithstanding Kovesi’s focus on Richards. Gibbon wrote defending criticism per se, and in the same issue of Westerly he and colleague Tom Gibbons produced what amounted to a New Critical manifesto in an essay with the title ‘A Critical Time’. A brief reply by Alec King, ‘A Too Too Critical Time’, appeared in the following issue of Westerly. King defended the idea of evaluation, from a perspective that was generally humanistic rather than specifically Leavisite. This relatively narrow debate is symptomatic of the approaches to literature that students could encounter at Western Australia, modes described by Jim Wieland as often ‘naïve, text-centred, and a-historical. Any text we read had an autonomous, autotelic existence in which we were to find a universal and authoritative meaning. The New Criticism was rampant, although no-one admitted to it’ (169–70). John Hay likewise suggests ‘lectures, tutorials, coffee-room conversations’, and even staff-meetings, ‘had in fact only one [albeit hidden] agenda item: the maintenance of the Britishness of English literature’ (18).

I also suspect that the shift of these debates from private feelings and conversations into print says more about tensions within and between departments and/or individuals than it does about deep intellectual differences, as Edwards’ mixing of Richards with Leavis and Eliot, and the criticism of Leavisism by Alec King, would suggest. In practice, things do tend to get mixed up. As a first-year student at the University of Western Australia in 1980, I was badly thrown by the first assignment which asked me to write a ‘practical criticism’ (Richards’ term). My very nice college tutor was unable to disguise her disbelief when I explained I did not know what ‘practical criticism’ was, but in discussion we realised that what was ‘practical criticism’ in Western Australia was ‘language’ 193in New South Wales (where I had gone to school). The only books of criticism in my state school library were by FR Leavis, but the ideas taught in class as preparation for the state matriculation exam owed most to New Criticism. At UWA Leavis was never mentioned; tutorials used a mix of new critical techniques while most lecturers, with a useful lack of consistency, tended to present an overview of historical and critical ideas about texts. While disputants might make a great deal of differences in the Westerly debate, their methods were suspiciously similar in practice, in part because a little more ecumenical than either Wieland or Hay concede.

Although it was some time before Edwards’ presence was felt in the rest of the country, it is a measure of his eventual influence in Australia that, as Bradley notes, at least ten members of the UWA department who worked with him went on to hold chairs in other universities. Thus Perth became a conduit of Leavisism, a mode which has been associated most closely with the universities of Melbourne, Monash and La Trobe. The movement of academics from Perth to the city of Melbourne is a marked trend: Bradley, along with King and Jean Tweedie (Jean Bradley) moved to Monash, where King held a chair from 1966 to 1969, and Bradley likewise from 1972 to 1989. Derick Marsh, a South African who spent time teaching at Natal and Sydney, was foundation professor at La Trobe from 1966 to 1977. After a three-year period in the chair at Western Australia, Marsh returned to La Trobe for a further decade, during which time he was one of the participants in the ‘La Trobe debate’. This controversy was prompted by an American member of the department of English, Lucy Frost, who had argued that social and historical questions needed to be considered in the reading and teaching of literature – anathema to a New Critic. Frost’s essay, although not openly directed towards her colleagues, constituted a thoughtful critique of new criticism, and predictably, attracted a hostile response (for an account of the debate, see Healy). Marsh’s successor, Richard Freadman, came to La Trobe from UWA, and can be identified with a small group of critics arguing for a reconfigured Leavisism that centralises moral/ethical questions (see for example Freadman and Miller). 194

The claims made in this chapter about the broader influence of Leavisite criticism on educational philosophy, pedagogy and teacher education can be more easily seen in the work of another academic in Australia who, like Edwards, was connected with both Leavis and IA Richards. In his essay ‘Australian Literature and the Universities’, Bruce Bennett has drawn attention to the work of Ernest Biaggini, calling it a forgotten aspect of literary studies in Australia. Bennett concludes that Biaggini’s work implicitly constituted an argument for the study of Australian literature. Although both Bennett and Ian Hunter have made claims about Biaggini’s obscurity, in fact he was a well-known teacher and extension lecturer in Adelaide, who published a number of books on literature and education. Four of these were favourably reviewed in Scrutiny (see Edwards; Birrell; Chapman [2]); Biaggini also produced an autobiography, You Can’t Say That.

The first and the most extended of the Scrutiny reviews was written by Allan Edwards. In considering Biaggini’s English in Australia, Edwards argues that Leavisism must be elitist if it is to be workable:

Whilst there is a startling conservatism in Edwards’ claim, Biaggini’s own work was in mass education. His research was close in scope and method to that of IA Richards, but owed its moral energy to Leavis. Specifically, it reflected the belief that literary education should be used to combat the dehumanisation caused by industrialisation, and the materialism implied by popular culture, two central goals of the Leavisite program (see Mulhern 101). Biaggini suggested that ‘what we want is not a visiting Leavis, not even a Leavis as principal of a teachers’ college, but a Leavis in charge of every teachers’ college in Australia. Then we would have a bloodless revolution in a generation and our culture might be saved’ (You Can’t Say That, 141–42). But things could not always be 195saved, and Scrutiny ceased publication. In 1956 four young lecturers at Adelaide, bristling with initials and indignation, wrote to Essays in Criticism to lament its demise (see Davies et al.).

It was through pedagogy that Leavisite criticism had its most lasting impact in Australia, but it is difficult to convey just what was required of an outstanding student who adopted the Leavisite method. This requires a separate study in itself, but comparison of two tertiary examination papers from Melbourne University give some idea. A paper for a third-year examination in English in 1928, preserved in the Gouldthorpe papers, focuses mainly on the work of Matthew Arnold, although there are other options. Students are asked to determine Arnold’s finest poem and explain the reasons for their choice; to outline Arnold’s main contribution to literary criticism; or to describe and illustrate his attitude to nature. In Part B of the paper, they could compare the craftsmanship of Tennyson and Browning; contrast Carlyle and Newman as prose writers; discuss the work of three living poets; or describe, from their reading, the main characteristics of nineteenth-century English literature.

By 1956, in questions set for honours (fourth-year) students, there is a visible ‘intensification’ in the kinds of responses required, and a shift from analysis of the work of critics and essayists to a kind of criticism of the emotions. It is a subtle change, one that reflects the influence of Leavisism, and it is helpful to consider the paper in detail to try and demonstrate the precise nature of what was expected. Students were required to answer three questions from Section A, and two from Section B:

There are two recurring elements in these questions, ‘standards’ and sensibility. Rather than instructions like describe or compare, students in 1956 are asked to comment upon ‘fine excess’, ‘dramatic intensity’, ‘sustained beauty’, the ‘poetic vision of life’, ‘concentrated tragic power’ and ‘the essence of Shakespeare’. Although Eliot is present in several forms in the 1956 examination, specifically with the question on the objective correlative, the main intellectual influences are clearly Leavis and Arnold, and what is most highly rewarded is a confident judgement of value (à la ‘Revaluations’). The questions invite assurance, something modelled in the reference to the ‘gifted student’ in question four. The 1956 examination is slightly more prescriptive in terms of texts and aesthetics, while the 1928 paper places more emphasis on literary history. In terms of genre there is a discernible shift away from prose towards drama, although poetry is the dominant form in both. Although the 1956 paper could be taken as recalling Green’s emphasis on searching for moral examples, it seems far more important to make judgements about literary quality, although the degree to which reflection on the terms of that preference (as Green called on his colleagues to do) is required is unclear.

Educated differently, I struggle to understand the meaning of the key terms in this examination, which seem to reference emotion rather than critical interpretation or scholarship, but it seems fair to allow Melbourne’s most famous Leavisite, SL Goldberg, to offer comment on likely reasons for my failure:

The passage is from a posthumously published work in which Goldberg argues for restoring the moral purpose of literary study; the work of William Shakespeare, and of George Eliot, is featured.

Leavisism at Melbourne strengthened during the next two decades, mainly through the influence of Vincent Buckley, Goldberg, and their followers. Born in 1925 and 1926 respectively, Buckley and Goldberg had both returned to Melbourne after study in England, Goldberg having taken a BLitt at Oxford, while Buckley wrote the book Poetry and Morality during his time at Cambridge. Leavisite criticism at Melbourne reached its high water mark, measured in terms of postgraduate research, in the late 1960s and early 1970s, by which time Maxwell had retired and his two former students both held chairs. Goldberg obtained the Robert Wallace chair of English in 1966 while Buckley was awarded a personal chair two years later.

A former student of Buckley’s, who became a teacher of literature in a Melbourne university, commented to me that ‘his lectures were like religious experiences’. The religious simile is particularly apt. Born in the Victorian country town of Romsey, Buckley traced his descent mainly from Irish Catholic forebears, although later in life he became more concerned with the ‘Irish’ than the ‘Catholic’ part of his ancestry. Educated at a Jesuit college and involved with religious politics and culture early in his career, Buckley has chronicled his life in the autobiography Cutting Green Hay, and is the subject of a biography by John McLaren. In the late 1950s Buckley was involved with Prospect, a journal in which contributors aimed to formulate Catholic social criticism. He was also a member of a group called the Apostolate, which took as its mission ‘the reconciliation of … Church and University’ (Buckley, The Incarnation, 19). In ‘The World Awaiting Redemption’, from a volume of essays he himself edited, Buckley argued that the missionary enterprise rested on the transformation of the apostle himself – the mission was a resolutely 199male one – and not simply on attempts to introduce Christianity to Melbourne University (The Incarnation, 35).

The aim of Buckley’s Poetry and Morality is to develop interpretations of the work of Arnold, Eliot and Leavis that can be used to underpin a criticism, based on (Christian) ethics, that is applicable not just to the novel but to poetry. His three critics are those influential in the middle part of the twentieth century, but it is a puzzle why he did not choose also to write on one of the idealists, such as Green, Ker or Caird, whose work is more pertinent to his central problem. In the book, Buckley is emphatic, though, that he is not interested in philosophical methods or questions, a measure of the ways in which scholars and teachers of English now focused on a ‘national’ history in ways that writers like Arnold, Eliot and their contemporaries quite literally would not have understood. The broader imperial thrust of the book is clear: Arnold is chosen because he is distinctively English, a point which seems to simplify Arnold’s own views as well as to blur the meanings of that term to the advantage of the discipline.

Buckley begins the first of his two chapters on Leavis by suggesting that Leavis was acutely attuned to the institutional politics of literary education, something that would also be reflected in Buckley’s career and criticism. Perhaps overly influenced by his own religiosity, the following statement provides the clearest possible distillation of Leavis’ ideas as they were deployed in Buckley’s own criticism:

Responses to Poetry and Morality were mixed. Raymond Williams, a student of Leavis, declared that while the chapters on Arnold were unenlightening, those on Leavis were useful, and the section on Eliot brilliant. Gustav Cross was enthusiastic in Quadrant about the study of the ‘three greatest critics of the past hundred years’ and reviewed the book again for the Sydney Morning Herald. Another sympathetic reader 200was GKW Johnston. But it is hard to argue that the book influenced academic criticism in Australia, although there is evidence that these kinds of views inform areas like secondary teaching (especially in Victoria) and the literary media; it is still routine to evaluate literature in terms that relate to moral purpose and universal value. More generally, the entwining of personalities and institutions from Perth to Melbourne show a Leavisism at once diffuse and passionately expressed, in the teaching of English literature in the middle of the twentieth century. Passions were to rise at institutions other than UWA and La Trobe, though, as Leavisism found strong opposition north of the Murray River.

Musical Chairs: Sydney

Goldberg spent a relatively brief period in Sydney in the Challis chair of English literature. Unusually, all three chairs of English at the university were vacant: the McCaughey chair in early English language and literature, the Challis chair in English literature, and a newly created chair of Australian literature. The McCaughey professor had been AG Mitchell, who although he did considerable research on old English literature, is probably best known for his publications on spoken English in Australia and who became foundation vice-chancellor at Macquarie University. The former Challis professor (English literature) was Wesley Milgate, a specialist in the work of John Donne, who had taken up a senior position at the ANU.

The first professorial appointment made was of George Harrison Russell, then an associate professor at Sydney, to the McCaughey chair. After graduating from Victoria in New Zealand and writing a PhD thesis on ‘The Prose of the English Recusants 1558–1603’ at Cambridge, Russell taught at Victoria University College, at King’s College, London, and Sydney. His first professorial position was at Queensland, where he stayed from 1953 to 1957, but he felt that many colleagues at that institution were ‘poorly qualified’ (Buckley, George Russell, 4). He reinvigorated the library and was regarded as an outstanding scholar, although his publication record was sparser than that of colleagues 201whose scholarship was less well regarded.8 After leaving Sydney in 1966, Russell held senior positions at the ANU, and at Melbourne.9 In his tribute, Buckley described Russell as coming from a background similar to his own, albeit in New Zealand rather than Australia: ‘Catholic, rural, colonial, Irish-Antipodean, provincial, poor and highminded’ (1). The appointment of Russell having been made, a decision was taken that the Challis chair would be decided before the Australian one, ostensibly because two candidates were shortlisted for both. ‘Short short-lists’ of three and two were made, and copies of published work were called for.10 As a result of these proceedings, Goldberg was appointed to the Challis chair, and GA Wilkes, a graduate of Sydney and Oxford, to the chair in Australian literature. Further appointments were then made, including those of a number of academics from Melbourne who were close associates of Goldberg. This was a measure not only of the new professor’s influence, but of the expansion of universities, as well as the success of the discipline. Such was the rate of increase that the number of academic staff in English at Sydney more than doubled in three years.

Samuel Louis Goldberg was born in Melbourne and educated at Coburg and University high schools. Ian Maxwell considered Goldberg the most talented and erudite teacher of literature in the country, and as his head of department worried constantly about ‘how to keep him’ whilst asserting it was essential he have a chair as soon as possible. In early 1962 Goldberg became the first appointee to a chair of English at Sydney who was not a Sydney graduate; after a relatively short stay he took up research positions at the ANU, first in the history of ideas

202unit and, in the final few years of his career, in philosophy. He is the only example I can find of an academic in English who managed to obtain such a position, although all his major publications, excepting the posthumous Agents and Lives, predate his fifteen years of full-time research.

Goldberg and his followers published their work in the Melbourne Critical Review, later retitled the Critical Review. The first issue appeared in 1958, edited by Goldberg and Jennifer Dallimore (later Gribble), and the journal was an important outlet for Goldberg throughout his career, as he published essays emphasising the importance of moral judgement in criticism. The first editorial published in the journal works to naturalise the Leavisite approach, as the Melbourne Critical Review is positioned above partisanship, whilst in the centre of debate. The writers declare that ‘literature is not really an academic “subject” at all, nor are the issues it raises the concern only of teachers or passing groups of students’ (i). There is a social need for ‘alert, responsible criticism that promotes “an easy commerce with the old and new”, the vital sense of the past that is the condition of present growth’ (i). All of the contributions, it seems, fulfil this requirement, but their unanimity is merely a propitious congruity that implies the rightness of the method: ‘we have no other policy than to welcome critical writings of interest and quality on any literary subject (old or new) from anyone … from anywhere … and to publish as much discussion as we can for as many people as we can’ (i–ii). The clearest preference seems to have been for firm opinion. Early contributors to the journal included Leonie Kramer, who had essays published in 1959 and 1960, and AD Hope, who wrote on the decline of satire. Hope’s contribution to the first issue is also its most ferocious, as he attributes the degeneration of the genre to the ‘general decline in public taste’ (1). He rails against the ‘systematic degradation of public taste, the slow and persistent perversion of judgement, [and] the steady operation of moronic intelligence to produce a world safe and profitable for morons’, a world in which ‘nine tenths … have the tastes of morons’ (3; 5).

Goldberg’s equally uncompromising approach was signalled by his announcement at Sydney, made soon after his arrival, that students 203were being badly taught and, as a consequence, none would receive first-class honours that year – and they didn’t. Relations between Wilkes and Goldberg deteriorated, and when he returned from study leave in late 1964, George Russell found the situation, in his own words, ‘horrendous’. As the dispute reached its most public crisis point at the beginning of 1966, with separate ‘A’ and ‘B’ offerings in English for undergraduates, and academics handing out flyers to students, Russell unsurprisingly left for the ANU; Goldberg was appointed to the Robert Wallace chair at Melbourne. Thus the separate courses began with Goldberg’s departure imminent. (This ultimately brought relief to Sydney but not to Melbourne, where tensions between Goldberg’s followers and those of Buckley quickly escalated.) John Docker describes the situation at Sydney with verve:

Gavin Souter’s column in the Sydney Morning Herald presented the dispute between Wilkes and Goldberg as a stand-off between a dry-witted gunslinger and a devilish cherub, and notes the pettiness that hostilities had brought the participants to:

In his account of the conflicts published in The Bulletin – titled ‘Professor under Siege’ – Buckley, like other commentators, drew attention to the fact that the Sydney English Department was ‘famous for the amount of bad blood it seemed able to pump up’, a response 204(by a Melbournian …) that did little in the way of explanation (21). But I do concur with Buckley’s assessment that the disputes cannot simply be read as reflecting a gulf between critical approaches as they were espoused and practised by Wilkes and Goldberg; much greater differences had been accommodated in other departments without such schisms. Perhaps it is significant that the other disputes discussed above, at La Trobe and UWA, and which were in important ways connected to this one, have never been monumentalised in the press or memoir like ‘the Sydney split’ – although it is also worth noting that a cleavage also occurred in Philosophy at Sydney, leading eventually to the formation of two separate departments.

The contest can be read in another way, a reading suggested by Jonathan Dollimore. Dollimore argues that what is most bitterly contested is that which is radically proximate, the ‘other’ in which we can see our self. Although John Docker emphasises the theoretical differences between participants and implies that this is the basis for the dispute, an incident in the late 1940s suggests just how close some critics at Sydney, whose self-identifications might place them as implacable opponents of Leavis, really were to his approach. It also demonstrates just how intense was their fascination with and anxiety about his criticism and his authority. First, however, it is necessary to introduce Brereton’s successor at Sydney, AJA Waldock.

When Brereton died suddenly in February 1933, he was replaced in the chair by Arthur John Alfred Waldock, who would likewise die suddenly in his early fifties. Like Holme, Waldock was the son of a minister, and a devotee of English culture – one of his obituaries claims that he had planned to retire early and move to England. He held the Challis chair from 1934 to 1950, during which time he completed book-length studies of Shakespeare’s Hamlet, Milton’s Paradise Lost, Sophocles, and contemporary novelists, including Henry James and James Joyce. Like his teacher MacCallum he is remembered by a memorial issue of Southerly (Howarth), a journal in which he published regularly.

One senses that, as with MacCallum, Waldock’s tendency was to embrace idealism whilst retreating from its ‘critical’ dimension. The main argument in the study of Hamlet, for example, is that the play has 205become so ‘thickly encrusted’ by criticisms that it is difficult to read the text in its own right, although it is the task of the critic to uncover the real meaning. This claim marks Waldock as an exegetical critic, that is, one who believes in a single meaning which holds across different cultures and historical periods.

Waldock spends some time refuting the reading of Hamlet offered by Ernest Jones in his Essays in Applied Psycho-Analysis, clearly offended by the contention that some elements of the play might have been created unconsciously. He likewise rejects out of hand Jones’ suggestion that Shakespeare and/or Hamlet had incestuous desires, on the basis that such desires, or the expression of them, would constitute an offence against the exemplary morality that great art embodies and transmits – the same ‘defence’ that TG Tucker used in his discussion of Sappho. As we would expect, Waldock is concerned instead to discover the ‘real’ motivations for Hamlet’s various actions. In fact, he prefers to interpret Hamlet as a Christian idealist, indeed, as a Christian idealist critic. He argues that the main impression readers have of the Danish prince is of his

Taking his arguments from character to author, Waldock suggests that, with his hyper-developed sensibility, Hamlet was simply ‘a reflection of his creator, the fullest, no doubt, that we have’ (Waldock, Hamlet, 17). But Waldock’s criticism is also marked by considerable self-confidence, a characteristic we might associate with Leavisite criticism rather than the ‘disinterested scholarship’ supposedly prioritised at Sydney’s English department.

As Docker suggests, Waldock’s Paradise Lost and its Critics was considered one of the major works of scholarship produced at Sydney, alongside MacCallum’s book on Shakespeare’s Roman plays. But it received a condescending review in the Times Literary Supplement, 206which ended by rebuking the book’s author for amateurism (The New Miltonians). Three weeks later, a letter came defending the book:

The letter was signed FR Leavis.

In the first issue of Southerly published in 1948 Waldock, apparently stung more by this defence (or perhaps its last sentence) than by the negative review, replied with a bitter attack on Leavis’ reading of Hard Times (The Status). At the same time, Leavis followed up the encounter with ‘Mr Waldock’ by heavily revising his essay ‘In Defence of Milton’, first published in Scrutiny, as a chapter of his major work The Common Pursuit (33–43), where it stands as a sustained but very respectful critique of Waldock’s book. Paradise Lost and its Critics is now declared the best on Milton that Leavis has read (The Common Pursuit, 20); after one reference, ‘Mr Waldock’ becomes ‘Professor Waldock’. Thus John Peters’ essay on ‘the Milton controversy’, published in Scrutiny, places Waldock alongside Leavis in what he describes as the battle between the critics and the scholars.

Notwithstanding their own sense of Sydney as a place in which scholarship predominated over criticism, then, Waldock is read in England by followers of Leavis, and indeed by Leavis himself, as one of their own. The key dimension of this debate is audience: Leavis speaking to what he regarded as the very centre of English studies, whilst Waldock’s polemic is published in Southerly, a journal not distributed in England at the time. Waldock is clearly more concerned with maintaining his reputation in Sydney, and surely was mortified that 207Leavis did not know he was an academic; conversely, Leavis attemptsto take up a discussion with the hitherto unknown critic in a respectful way. ‘Mr Waldock’ ‘replies’, in a local forum, knowing he cannot be heard. The incident exposes the inequality that arises from geography, as it also exposes the fragility and the force of reputation. We can also note here Katharine Cooke’s comments on AC Bradley, replying to his critics (in England) during his inaugural lecture at Glasgow, ‘conducting his own defence in a place where unfortunately it is unlikely to be heard’ (47). And notwithstanding Sydney’s self-characterisation as ‘scholarly’ (Oxford) rather than ‘Leavisite’ (Cambridge), at least one student from the 1940s claimed that during this period, for students at Sydney ‘F.R. Leavis was The Light, Leavis was God’ (Moore, 90).

Professing Australian Literature

Previous histories have given particular attention, in discussions of debates about the teaching of Australian literature, to the establishment of the chair of Australian literature at Sydney. Within the climate there it is remarkable that the position was established at all, but the symbolic weight of Sydney as an institution means that this position is too often made homologous for the field as a whole, and indeed is regarded as a marker of the health of writing and publishing. The symbolic significance of the chair, and its fragility within the institution, are revealed in the disclosure by former holder Elizabeth Webby that she had considered ‘going public’ about threats to the future of the position after her retirement; her reluctance to do so at the time the chair was under threat demonstrates the wariness of many academics about revealing intra-university conflict in the manner done so destructively at Sydney in the mid sixties (Neill). More broadly, debates about Australian literature show both the influence of the ideology of guardianship, and the ambivalence of many of those in the discipline towards local writing. There are several notable differences between the terms of these debates and those about teaching English literature: both use polarities of provincialism and universalism, but those which occur in Australia are less marked by concern about gender and feminisation, and more inclined to cite standards of scholarship. 208

The attention given to the chair at Sydney often obscures the fact that a professor of Australian literature had already been appointed at an Australian university before Wilkes was appointed to Sydney. After George Russell left Queensland it was some years before the professorial position was filled, suggesting that the initial field had been disappointing to those in charge of making the appointment.11 Arthur Clare Cawley, a language specialist, finally came to Queensland from Leeds to take the Darnell chair in 1959, but resigned in May 1965 to return to Leeds. While Cawley was still at Queensland an advertisement was published for a second chair. Unusually the advertisement was not placed in the Times Literary Supplement, although two lectureships in English in the same department were advertised there at around the same time. This placement would seem to indicate that there was a desire to secure an Australian to occupy the professorial position; this selective positioning, along with sometimes unusual combinations of criteria and short deadlines for applications, are tactics still used to thin the field when a known candidate has front running.

The conditions of appointment specified that ‘Applicants should hold a higher degree in English Literature, should have taught and done administrative work in a senior University position, and should possess special qualifications for teaching and supervising in the field of Australian literature’.12 Early in 1960 AD Hope wrote to Vincent Buckley suggesting that he apply – other potential candidates he mentioned were Brian Elliott, Wilkes, and Russel Ward. Whether or not Buckley did apply is unclear, but as Hope noted in his letter, a senior member of the department at Queensland who closely matched the terms of the advertisement was likely to be preferred. AK Thomson was a graduate of Queensland and his publications were almost exclusively in Australian literature, although he had also produced numerous school texts.

Andrew Kilpatrick Thomson was born in Scotland in 1901, but came to Australia with his family and completed his schooling in

209Ipswich, near Brisbane. After becoming a teacher he undertook parttime study and for his final year went full time, in 1929 becoming the first student to graduate with first-class honours in English language and literature from Queensland. He took his MA, with a thesis on ‘The Mind of Shelley: Social Background and Ideas’, in 1933. At this stage, his hopes of an academic career could well have been thwarted by the longevity of his teachers at Queensland, JJ Stable and FW Robinson. But after teaching at leading private schools in three states and becoming president of the state teachers’ union, Thomson was seconded to the university in 1939 and to the English Department in 1941.13 During the war he published several brief items on Australian literature in Meanjin, the journal then being based in Brisbane, his first academic essay probably ‘The Greatness of Joseph Furphy’.

Thomson remained at Queensland through the 1940s and 1950s, eventually being promoted to reader, and acting as professor after Russell had left. During the 1950s he edited collections of critical essays on the poetry of Kenneth Slessor and of Judith Wright, along with several anthologies of poetry. The university’s reputation for studies in Australian literature dates from this period, and was facilitated by the activities of Brisbane publishers such as UQP and Jacaranda in producing educational and literary texts. Another important role for Thomson was as convenor of the Commonwealth Literary Fund lectures in Brisbane (1956–1959) which, through Wright’s eminence and scholarship, became major occasions for the discussion and celebration of Australian literature. There is little sign of contact with academics in Australia in Thomson’s staff file, but abundant evidence of connections with school-based educators.

Thomson’s students included David Malouf and Spencer Routh, the latter writing Thomson’s obituary for Arts News. After noting Thomson’s leading role in the teaching of English in Queensland, Routh describes him as

210

Thomson did not retire until 13 January 1971, and after some delay, was awarded the title of professor emeritus; he died in 1989. Thomson’s influence seems to have been localised, albeit highly significant in laying a foundation for the university’s subsequent reputation in the field of Australian literature. Nevertheless, Thomson’s work and position continue to be ignored in accounts of the development of the teaching of Australian literature, in favour of the focus on Sydney.

It was no doubt important, politically, that the committee formed to raise money to fund the position at Sydney was headed by Wesley Milgate, by then holder of the Challis chair. At the time of this campaign there were two quite different kinds of arguments made for having a professorial position devoted to the teaching and scholarship of Australian literature. One was that a professor was needed to oversee research in the subject, a view that reflected a conscious attempt to reclaim Australian literature from those working outside universities or in disciplines other than English, notably history and sociology (a villainous combination rather too inclined to radicalism). This task might have seemed more urgent in a period when ‘non-academics’ were publishing most in the area, and had been responsible, along with writers themselves, for developing the profile of Australian literature in academic circles. Advocates of academic research – among them Wilkes, AD Hope and James McAuley – argued that there was a need for textual scholarship, editing, bibliographies, and perhaps even biographies of Australian writers, and that such work was best done under professorial supervision.

The other argument for the creation of a chair of Australian Literature was very different: it was that the subject deserved its own senior university position because it was Australian, and that intellectuals 211had a responsibility to nurture local forms of cultural production. Although this was not the view that held sway within the university, it was the argument that had the greatest purchase for writers and for the reading public (as now), and among education policy makers (as now).14 Donations to allow for the establishment of the position were received from individuals as well as a variety of organisations, including unions.15 However the claim that a professor of Australian literature had a responsibility to act as an advocate for Australian culture clearly caused the first two holders of the Sydney chair some discomfort, in large part because they saw their role differently.

At the time of the campaign for public subscriptions the ‘prime movers’ on the committee were the secretary, Colin Roderick, and the chair, Milgate. But in spite of their activities and widespread community support, the appeal fell well short of the amount needed to support a full professorial salary from interest. According to a press item in the Meanjin archive, £21,000 had been raised, but the sum needed was more like £80,000. Milgate, in a letter to Roderick, proposed a solution that would lay the foundation for the splitting of English subjects ten years later:

212As Milgate’s comments make clear, the task of the occupant of the chair was to bring to bear on Australian literature scholarly approaches used to discuss English literature, rather than to do anything so creative as to rethink the premises of literary study. What are more difficult to discern are Milgate’s tone and intention here: was he ‘going through motions’ with the committee, and in fact determined to ensure that the position would not be an autonomous one? Or was he genuinely committed to the idea, seeing this compromise as the only viable way forward?

Had the chair been limited to specialists in Australian literature there would have been few applicants. One possible candidate, Roderick himself, was hardly eligible given his role in fundraising, although subsequent events suggest he did see himself as well suited to the position at the time. He took several degrees from Queensland and in 1954 was awarded a PhD in Australian literature, possibly the country’s and the subject’s first, for a study of the work of Rosa Praed.17 Roderick spent twenty years working as education editor at Angus and Robertson during which time and after his research was focused on Henry Lawson. He published widely, particularly on writers of the nineteenth century, and was a vigorous advocate of the study of Australian books (especially if they were published by A&R). Roderick did eventually obtain a chair, but was in his mid fifties when he took up a professorial position at James Cook University in Townsville, where he stayed for just over a decade.

A swifter path to the professoriate was taken by the first occupant of the chair of Australian literature at Sydney, Gerald Alfred Wilkes. Wilkes attended Canterbury Boys’ High and then Sydney, completing his Master of Arts thesis on the poetry of Christopher Brennan, this thesis and its ensuing publications – five essays in Southerly republished as a monograph – establishing his reputation as a scholar. After some years lecturing, and completing his Oxford DPhil in 1956, Wilkes was

213appointed senior lecturer in 1957. He became the foundation professor of Australian literature in 1962 and Challis professor of English literature in 1966. Wilkes’ tenure in the Australian chair was brief but his connection with Australian literature has been maintained through the journals Southerly, in which he has more than fifty publications, and Australian Literary Studies. Another important work was Wilkes’ The Stockyard and the Croquet Lawn: Literary Evidence for Australia’s Cultural Development, the subtitle of which uses the trope of maturation prevalent in many early academic studies of Australian literature.

In his inaugural lecture, The University and Australian Literature, delivered in 1964, Wilkes struggles to balance the Anglocentric values associated with ‘scholarship’ with the commitment to the national literature implied in his position. He accepts the ‘junior’ status of Australian literature and makes no claim for its value ‘simply because it is the native literature’ (6) – a view that many critics, perhaps even MacCallum, would not have accepted. He felt that the ‘standards’ applied to the literatures of England and Europe should ‘be applied no less rigorously’: ‘at a University there cannot be any “special standard” for local writing’ (19–20). Thus, RD FitzGerald and Hope are praised for writing a poetry ‘that is distinctive and yet in no way provincial’. The dreaded epithet, ‘provincial’, haunts the institutional position that Wilkes occupies.

In terms of sentiment and approach, there is little that would offend a Leavisite critic: the history of Australian writing represents ‘a line of steady progress’, towards a literature that was, in 1964, ‘distinctive and mature’ (9). The most significant statement in the lecture, one that reveals Wilkes trapped between the obligations of his appointment and the need to appeal to the ‘traditions’ of the discipline, is the assertion that ‘it is only because a man fears for his national image that he takes … a defensive position. If he did not identify himself with local culture, he would have nothing to worry about’ (6; emphasis added). It is this position of detachment that Wilkes himself can be seen to have taken, but there is a strange reversal here: it is the local that is strange and alien; it is the universalised culture of Anglo-European scholarship that makes the newly appointed professor of Australian literature feel ‘at home’.

214In an essay on the 1890s published some years before he was appointed to the chair, Wilkes demonstrated the impact that his dismissive attitude to cultural context could have on the reading and evaluation of particular kinds of literature. ‘Literature in the Eighteen Nineties in Australia’ attempts to diminish the reputation of the popular Australian writers of that period, and its subsequent inclusion in GKW Johnston’s collection Australian Literary Criticism was a gesture against literary nationalism. One aim of the essay is to demonstrate that there is a substantial amount of writing from this period that does not immediately declare its national identity, but the main aim is to put the case that the writing of Henry Lawson, Banjo Paterson and others from the 1890s had ‘achieved a literary reputation out of proportion to its merit’. This argument is all but proven by the fact that such literature was popular: ‘their work was aimed always at the meridian of popular taste: they wrote the sort of literature that did not need to be interpreted’ (33). Because Wilkes wanted to reclaim Furphy’s Such is Life for ‘the canon’, however, he was forced to declare that Furphy’s own famous description of the novel – ‘temper democratic, bias offensively Australian’ – is itself a furphy:

Again the preference is for opacity, but the problem is that such an argument cannot account for Furphy’s demotic politics, his setting, nor the specificity of his literary, political and social references. To read only the themes identified above is to give a universalist account of the book. In the same manner, and for the same reasons, Wilkes’ successor in the chair, Leonie Kramer, rejected David Campbell’s claim that his own poetry represented ‘an attempt to couple the bush ballad and my early memories with the traditional ballad and early English 215lyrics’. ‘That statement’, says Kramer, ‘does not … do justice to the delicacy with which Campbell reactivates the past, and brings it into present experience’ (A Sense of the Past 26). For Wilkes and many of his contemporaries, Australian literature was most productively read within the context of a more ‘mature’ British or European tradition, a method exemplified in his work on Brennan. This method demands wide reading and intensive scholarship, but it tends to see history in purely literary terms – to understand ‘influence’ in terms of one text acting upon another – rather than considering other contexts which affect writing and reading. And more stylistically eccentric and overtly left-wing writers, like Christina Stead, are difficult to fit into the picture.

This trend can be seen in criticism by Kramer, whose publishing career began (as Leonie Gibson) with Henry Handel Richardson: Some of Her Sources. Dame Professor Emeritus Leonie Judith Kramer was born in Melbourne in 1924, and attended the Presbyterian Ladies’ College in that city (see Jobling and Runcie). She graduated with a BA from Melbourne and a DPhil from Oxford, and she taught at Canberra College (with AD Hope) in the mid fifties, and at the University of New South Wales (1959–69) before the appointment to the Sydney Chair.18 Over the course of her career, Kramer combined publication in the field of Australian literature with an even more extensive range of publications and addresses to general and educational organisations. After leaving the chair in 1989 she became Sydney’s chancellor; her departure from that position in 2001 was uncharacteristically controversial. She has also been unusual in having had a career in the corporate world, as director of several large companies and organisations: chair of the board of the Australian Broadcasting Commission (ABC), the National Institute of Dramatic Art (NIDA) and Quadrant, and a member of the St Vincent’s

216Hospital, NRMA, and NSW Secondary School Studies boards. Ian Maxwell regarded Kramer as second only to Goldberg in brilliance as a scholar, and used her as a benchmark in writing references for others.

Kramer’s career is a fascinating one for the way in which it demonstrates the capacity to leverage authority from one cultural arena to another: in sharp contrast to Walter Murdoch, it seems to be her work in the public sphere that has cemented Kramer’s academic reputation; her gender makes her even more anomalous and this achievement more notable. Against this reading, Kramer herself has long insisted that she occupies a position outside of ideology, and it is entirely consistent with her views that she should lend her voice to a group calling itself ‘Leadership above Politics’, formed to campaign for the retention of the monarchy in Australia. As a long-time president of the Australia–Britain Society and of the Australian Council for Educational Standards, Kramer’s public reiteration of the need to maintain cultural ties with Britain and to uphold ‘standards’ (the two are connected) increased in frequency and intensity over the course of her long career. Despite this position, however, Kramer’s own teaching has at times reflected a more catholic approach. A press item by Andreas Carr noted that Kramer’s Australian literature subjects at the University of New South Wales offered students key texts in history and sociology read alongside creative writing, although this approach and indeed Australian literary studies more generally appear to have received minimal support from the institution. In the same way, several of Kramer’s former students have stressed to me the innovative and challenging place occupied by her teaching of Australian literature in the English curriculum at Sydney in the 1960s and 1970s.

Kramer, like a number of other senior academics in the field, has suggested that her reading experiences at high school and university profoundly shaped her understanding of the role of literature. In her essay ‘Living Two Lives’, for a collection which examines cultural ties between Australia and Britain, she suggests that

Kramer’s words, and her gently self-deprecating tone, are echoed by Ian Donaldson, also a graduate of Melbourne and Oxford, who was professor of English at the Australian National University from 1969 to 1990.19 Donaldson suggests that

We might reasonably expect senior members of the profession to demonstrate a deep commitment to the subject of English literature, but there is a kind of entrapment in a culture and landscape, an intimacy and a nostalgia, that conversely obscure the local, or perhaps more accurately, empty it of the significance we associate with ‘culture’. Through the study of a canon dominated by English writers, England is constructed as text and therefore inviolable; Australia is context, and therefore ultimately anomalous for scholars, the authority of the literary text and the institution working in concert. And the reverse effect, the exclusion of their own country from the landscape of the imagination, has been so complete that, for many Australian readers, when ‘a physically known place graduated to the rank of a book-mentioned

218place it was almost as if an old family friend had been knighted’ (Phillips, Cultural Nationalism, 131).

Kramer, herself ‘knighted’, has always promoted herself as a rigid adherent to tradition, and insisted, at least in public, that her gender was irrelevant to her profession. In an interview with Richard Freadman, Kramer replied dismissively to his request for a comment on the ‘role and prominence of women in Australian English departments’: ‘English departments on the whole tend to have more women than many other departments, but I don’t think that’s particularly important. I don’t get myself worked up about it, I must say’ (Freadman, Literature 18). In the same year Kramer made news with her remark, offered in an address to mark the centenary of the graduation of the first woman from Melbourne University, that she hoped that ‘the campaign for women’s participation in academic life will not be too successful’: ‘the most important academic procedures – selection and promotion – are in intention and overwhelmingly in operation, scrupulously equitable’ (Hawker). It was a view she was prepared to reiterate a year later:

There is a great honesty at work here: it is quite correct to say that the discipline of English, from the 1930s to the early 1970s, did not see difference. But unlike Matthew Arnold, to whom she regularly refers in her work, Kramer’s argument seeks to put the case that ‘standards’ exist above and beyond the sites of their creation and maintenance. Indeed, for Kramer, the integrity of the critic rests on taking this position above literature and society, in an argument that in some aspects echoes that of William Paton Ker.

The effect of deploying this dichotomy between universal value and local interest can be seen in Kramer’s criticism of writers such as Martin Boyd, who, like Henry Handel Richardson, is favoured because of his concern with people caught between England and Australia. In a discussion of his novel Lucinda Brayford, Kramer notes that 219

Melba singing is not part of culture, nor is Melbourne architecture.

In an essay on ‘Literary Criticism in Australia’, Kramer more fully explains her views of the relationships between criticism, literature and culture, beginning by suggesting that, far from being negligent about Australian literature, critics are confused by nationalism:

There are contradictions here, especially in relation to social and historical context, but more to the point, I think Kramer is wrong. Many critics of the 1890s and after were open to Australian literature. Indeed, in this period, writers as much as academics travelled to London for recognition, and Australian and academic culture were cosmopolitan, in terms of their reading at least, something made clear in the recent 220scholarship of Veronica Kelly. It was advocates of Australian literature among the postwar generation who took up the literature of the 1890s in order to make cultural nationalist arguments, working in explicit opposition to the critical methods exemplified by Kramer and many of her colleagues. In short, this is not a simple identification of truth, but a taking of a position in a debate about a version of the past that can be used to buttress the authority of a specific critical method.

The range of organisations with which she was involved, and particularly her time at the ABC, gave Kramer the highest public profile of any teacher of literature in the country in the second half of the twentieth century, as she assumed the prominence accorded earlier generations of academics. Using the platform provided by the profile established beyond academia, she participated in public debate and did so with great success. Despite this prominence, Kramer’s work was not generally well received in the academy itself.20 Widespread hostility to Kramer’s aesthetic can be seen in reviews of the Oxford History of Australian Literature, which appeared in The Age and The Australian newspapers (Phillips; Brady), Australian Book Review (Barnes), Australian Literary Studies (Croft; Elliott), The Bulletin (Dutton), Meanjin (Pierce), New Literature Review (Alan Lawson) and the National Times (Green).

The project had been proposed by GKW Johnston but was ultimately edited by Kramer, who also wrote the introduction. Whether they were responding to the book or to public perceptions of Kramer, reviewers insistently drew attention to the History’s sustained efforts at canon-making, in which it imitated Johnston’s Australian Literary Criticism.

221It was significant, as Peter Pierce notes, that ‘Kramer’s team has eschewed footnotes, thereby increasing the impression that Australian literature has been created in a vacuum, without reference to other literatures or to literary theory’ (371). But reviews of both the History and Johnston’s Anthology drew attention to the ways in which a certain degree of mateyness was evident. The most caustic critic of the latter was Ken Goodwin: ‘Well over half this book is made up of an excellent selection of material. The rest displays an air of randomness, cosiness, and – in the worst sense – mateship. The book needed more care and less prejudice’ (Prejudices, 30).

The careers and criticism of Wilkes and Kramer have parallels: both completed their doctorates at Oxford on subjects unrelated to Australian literature, Kramer on ‘Formal Satire in the First Half of the Seventeenth Century 1600–1650’ (1953) and Wilkes on ‘The Poetry of Moral Reflection at the Turn of the Sixteenth Century’ (1956). These qualifications, and their mantra of objectivity and disinterest, gave both critics the credibility, the intellectual capital, to enable them to ‘invest’ in Australian literature without risking charges of parochialism. The values underpinning their approach led to praise for writers like Christopher Brennan and Henry Handel Richardson, as well as Joseph Furphy, AD Hope, Patrick White and Martin Boyd, whose work could be situated, in terms of theme or style, within British and European traditions. There is, in fact, a noticeable similarity in the role that the studies of Richardson and Brennan played in the early careers of Kramer and Wilkes respectively, and it is significant that these should be cited, in a 1956 article on the moves to establish the chair, as evidence of the respectability of Australian literature (Why a Chair).21 Australian literature was potentially canonical insofar as it could be read as an offshoot of the literature and culture of England, a fresh young branch on the tree, an adolescent member of the family. The work of equally prolific and influential critics like Nettie Palmer, or Dorothy Green, or AA Phillips, is obscured by such accounts.

222Wilkes and Kramer saw the incorporation of Australian literature into English literature as a desirable strategy. They and many of their generation were self-conscious guardians of a tradition, like those disciples of Leavis, who himself believed that the

The mission of Leavisite criticism was to mount a sustained and deliberate campaign to reshape the literary canon: great literature presented timeless and universal moral problems, in texts which offered formal and ethical closure. These ways of speaking about literature are evident in much twentieth-century literary criticism in Australia, and in teaching. An examination of titles in the Union List of High Degree Theses suggests that, notwithstanding its 1930s beginnings in England, Leavisism was at its strongest in Australia in the early 1970s. During this period Australian literature was virtually abandoned by postgraduate students at Melbourne, while the contents of the Leavisite canon were under close scrutiny: theses were given titles like ‘Spontaneity versus Immorality: A Comparison of the Paul and Miriam Section of Sons and Lovers with the Relationship of Anna and Will in The Rainbow’. Within the academy, it was possible to cultivate a sense of being under siege, not from modern culture, as we might expect (and as was the case for Leavis), but from provincialism. Academics like Kramer, Buckley, Johnston, Oliver and Wilkes, who took an interest in Australian literature, were able to experience ‘their uninterrupted historical continuity and their special qualification [and] thus put themselves forward as autonomous and independent of the dominant social group’ (Gramsci 2237). Ernst de Chickera and DJ Enright suggest, in their Introduction to an anthology of criticism for undergraduates, that ‘taste’ is ‘the habit of naturally and actively enjoying [the genuine] and rejecting [the fake]. The word naturally should be stressed, for there is nothing conscious or pretentious about a formed good taste’ (x).22 Formed, yet natural; this is Bourdieu’s ‘spontaneity without consciousness’, what he calls ‘habitus’.

In the study and teaching of literature, development of expertise is part of a process by which a tiny minority of student readers are selected for socialisation into the profession. This, habitus, is ‘Produced by the work of inculcation and appropriation that is needed in order for objective structures … to be reproduced in the form of the durable, adjusted dispositions that are the condition of their functioning’ (Bourdieu, Logic 57). Individuals ‘partake of the history objectified in institutions’ and thereby ‘keep them in activity, continuously pulling them from the state of dead letters’: ‘Property appropriates its owner, embodying itself in the form of a structure generating practices perfectly conforming [to] its logic and its demands’ (57). What Bourdieu is describing is ‘the purely social and quasi-magical process of socialization … with all its corresponding privileges and obligations, and which is prolonged, strengthened and confirmed by social treatments that tend to transform instituted difference into natural distinction’ (58). And this naturalising of distinction has ‘quite real effects, durably inscribed in the body and in belief’ (58). There is a kind of cultural tautology to scholarly inquiry guided by ‘disinterest’: it values what is valuable because it is known to be valuable; the expression of value constitutes and marks the critic as a believer in, an upholder of, literary values. The postwar scholars, educated in the 1940s and 1950s, came to power in the 1960s as the youthful guardians of culture. And of this generation, it is Kramer who has carried this ‘durable inscription’ of ‘natural distinction’ most effectively beyond the academic community, into the media and political arenas.

224Elsewhere in the English-speaking world and in Australian universities, there were developments in fields like linguistics and anthropology (notably structuralism), philosophy, psychoanalysis and psychology, sociology and Marxism in the twenties and thirties which would later have a profound effect on English studies. For example, Freud’s works had been translated into English and published by the Hogarth Press in the early twenties, while Marxist literary studies were published by Australian critics working outside the academy such Jack Lindsay and Jack Beasley. Although a few individuals were familiar with these ideas – Allan Edwards was a proponent of Freud’s thought, and writer critics like Katharine Susannah Prichard and Judith Wright were also aware of these intellectual movements – Marxist and Freudian approaches were usually dismissed in a discipline determined to resist dilution. Strange as it may seem, the emphasis on ‘scholarship’ can seem oddly anti-academic, although not in the sense that FR Leavis used the term; criticism in this period was abruptly closed to cross-fertilisation. There was a widespread and uneasy consensus in the discipline in the postwar period that criticism might contribute in some way towards shaping trends – for some, ‘standards’ – in creative writing, but this was generally overwhelmed by a sense of leading scholars withdrawing from cultural organisations and contacts with writers and turning instead to educational or scholarly ones.

Debates about the introduction of English literature to English universities were in some ways leavened in their intensity (and diluted in their logic) by the jostling between parallel disciplines like classics and modern languages; English was the upstart, the pragmatist, the intruder. In contrast, opposition to Australian literature within English took a much simpler rhetorical form: for opponents, this body of texts was newer, smaller, and not as good, and therefore deserved neither a place in the curriculum nor the attention of scholars. Nevertheless, we should be alert to the fact that the meanings, or rather the connotations, of ‘Australian’ were different for different participants in this debate. In contrast to prevailing sentiments in the academy in the last three decades, when the increasing influence of identity politics focused on race, gender and cultural background, as well as class and sexuality, 225made ‘nation’ a category to contest or critique, the framing of local writing by the category of ‘nation’ was seen as an obvious conceptual and political tool with which to manoeuvre it into the academy – although this was not the only one available, as we shall see in the next chapter. Put another way, what might have been seen simply as a geographical designation was marked, in an expression of what Phillips called ‘the cultural cringe’, as writing which, by virtue of its national identity, was not worthy of academic study (Australian Tradition).

The effects of Anglophile sentiment and Anglo-American theory, understood as movements like ‘Leavisism’, ‘new criticism’ and ‘practical criticism’, were felt in the academy through to the 1970s, and long after in some places; very few academics specialised in Australian literature, and those who did were often regarded as fools, something that emerges very strongly in private correspondence. But crucially, many whose training and teaching were mainly in English literature were active as reviewers of contemporary Australian writing; research remains to be done in considering the impacts of these reviews on reputations of writers, in terms of the form and the reception of their work. In contrast to this interest in the judgement of Australian literature, critical theory received little scrutiny from members of the professoriate, the notable exception being Buckley’s Poetry and Morality. There are no sustained analyses of how or why Anglo-American approaches are those best suited to Australian contexts, no-one who took up Franklin’s call for a rethinking of critical expectations. By the time that challenge came, in the 1980s and 1990s, broader political changes and changes to the academic environment meant that nation became an intellectually, even an ethically, unworkable category of analysis for literary scholars. The next chapter will consider in detail the ways in which critical perspectives affected debates about the teaching and criticism of Australian literature in the academy from the late nineteenth century on.