Frank Raymond "F. R." Leavis ( ; 14 July 1895 – 14 April 1978) was an English literary critic of the early-to-mid-twentieth century. He taught for much of his career at Downing College, Cambridge, and later at the University of York.
Leavis ranked among the most prominent English-language critics in the 1950s and 1960s. J. B. Bamborough wrote of him in 1963: "it would be true to say that in the last thirty or more years hardly anyone seriously concerned with the study of English literature has not been influenced by him in some way."
According to Clive James, "You became accustomed to seeing him walk briskly along Trinity Street, gown blown out horizontal in his slipstream. He looked as if walking briskly was something he had practised in a wind-tunnel."
Early life and education
Leavis was born in Cambridge in 1895 to Harry Leavis (1862–1921) and Kate Sarah Moore (1874–1929). His father was a cultured man who ran a shop in Cambridge that sold pianos and other musical instruments, and his son was to retain a respect for him throughout his life. Leavis was educated at The Perse School in Cambridge (in English terms a public school), whose headmaster was Dr W. H. D. Rouse. Rouse was a classicist and known for his "direct method", a practice which required teachers to carry on classroom conversations with their pupils in Latin and classical Greek. Though he had some fluency in foreign languages, Leavis felt that his native language was the only one on which he was able to speak with authority. His extensive reading in the classical languages is not therefore strongly evident in his work.
Leavis had won a scholarship from the Perse School to Emmanuel College, Cambridge, to study history. Britain declared war on Germany soon after he matriculated, when he was 19. Leavis left Cambridge after his first year as an undergraduate and joined the Friends' Ambulance Unit (FAU) at York in 1915. After the introduction of conscription in 1916, when his brother Ralph also joined the FAU, he benefited from the blanket recognition of the members of the Friends' Ambulance Unit as conscientious objectors. Leavis is quoted as saying: "But after the Bloody Somme there could be no question for anyone who knew what modern war was like of joining the army."
He worked in France behind the Western Front, carrying a copy of Milton's poems with him. His wartime experiences had a lasting effect on him, making him prone to insomnia. He maintained that exposure to poison gas retained in the clothes of soldiers who had been gassed damaged his physical health, but that his poor digestion was due to "...not gas at Ypres, but the things I didn't say". Leavis was slow to recover from the war, and he was later to refer to it as "the great hiatus". He said: "The war, to put it egotistically, was bad luck for us."
On his return from the war in 1919, Leavis resumed his studies at Cambridge and obtained a lower second-class in Part I of the history tripos. He then changed his field of study to English and became a pupil in the newly founded English School. Despite graduating with first-class honours in his final examinations, Leavis was not seen as a strong candidate for a research fellowship and instead embarked on a PhD, then an unusual career move for an aspiring academic. In 1924, Leavis presented a thesis on The Relationship of Journalism to Literature, which "studied the rise and earlier development of the press in England". This work contributed to his lifelong concern with the way in which the ethos of a periodical can both reflect and mould the cultural aspirations of a wider public.
Career
In 1927 Leavis was appointed as a probationary lecturer for the university, and, when his first substantial publications began to appear a few years later, their style was much influenced by the demands of teaching. In 1929 Leavis married one of his students, Queenie Roth, He later wrote a piece Memories of Wittgenstein recalling their friendship.
New Bearings in English Poetry was the first major volume of criticism Leavis was to publish, Leavis vigorously attacked Snow's suggestion, from a 1959 lecture and book by C. P. Snow (see The Two Cultures), that practitioners of the scientific and humanistic disciplines should have some significant understanding of each other, and that a lack of knowledge of 20th century physics was comparable to an ignorance of Shakespeare. Leavis's ad hominem attacks on Snow's intelligence and abilities were widely decried in the British press by public figures such as Lord Boothby and Lionel Trilling.
Leavis introduced the idea of the "third realm" as a name for the method of existence of literature; works which are not private like a dream or public in the sense of something that can be tripped over, but exist in human minds as a work of collaborative re-constitution. The notion of the "third realm" has not received much attention subsequently.
Character and reputation
As Leavis continued his career he became increasingly dogmatic, belligerent and paranoid, and Martin Seymour-Smith found him (and his disciples) to be "fanatic and rancid in manner". Leavis's conduct led to a breach with T. S. Eliot, who wrote