As literary duels go, this one could hardly be more gripping. The grand old
Marxist of letters, Terry Eagleton, has strapped on his notched side-iron
and called out Martin Amis, the fancy gunslinger of the chattering saloons.
The OK Corral where they are destined to meet is the university campus that
has recently brought them within range of each other.
Eagleton, a 64-year-old intellectual, one of the world’s leading literary
theorists, threw down a challenge calculated to inflame his younger
adversary. Accusing Amis of Islamophobia for suggesting a clampdown on
Muslims, he attacked the novelist’s late father Kingsley as “a racist,
antisemitic boor, a drink-sodden, self-hating reviler of women, gays and
liberals”. Amis fils, he sneered, “clearly learnt more from him than how to
turn a shapely phrase”.
The venue of their showdown is Manchester University, where Eagleton has been
professor of cultural theory since 2001. Amis, author of The Rachel Papers,
Money and London Fields, took up the post as professor of creative writing
at the university last month. The timing of the encounter depends on
Eagleton, who splits his life between his home in Dublin, Londonderry (where
his wife teaches at Ulster University) and Manchester.
To his friends, Eagleton is a warm, funny man with a twinkly smile who
displaced F R Leavis as Britain’s most influential academic critic. To his
critics he is “that dreadful Terry Eagleton”, as Prince Charles called him –
a butterfly who follows new cultural trends and whose fame owes more to
self-promotion than original thinking. His youthful job as an encyclopedia
salesman, he once admitted, was his “earliest experience of peddling ideas
to the masses, a project which was later to become my full-time occupation”.
Relishing his contradictions, Eagleton was a working-class Catholic who became
a don at the heart of the Establishment in Oxford, where he sold
revolutionary papers on street corners and held Irish musical evenings at
which he performed his own satirical songs.
Many famous names have felt his critical lash. He dismissed Richard Dawkins’s
recent book The God Delusion as “a vulgar caricature of religious faith that
would make a first-year theology student wince”.
Now Amis “and his ilk” are in his sights. Amis’s offence was his assertion
that as the Islamic population grows, “the Muslim community will have to
suffer until it gets its house in order”. Shortly before the fifth
anniversary of the 9/11 terrorist attacks, the novelist published an essay
in which he argued that fundamentalists had won the battle between Islam and
Islamism.
In an interview around the same time, Amis suggested “strip-seaching people
who look like they’re from the Middle East or from Pakistan”, preventing
Muslims from travelling, and possible deportation. To Eagleton such views
typify a drift to the right by the “cluster of liberals and leftists” in his
circle who “defend western freedom by actively undermining it”.
His platform for his counterblast is the new foreword to his 1991 classic,
Ideology: An Introduction. Eagleton’s beef is that no eminent British writer
is prepared any longer to question the capitalist wellsprings that he claims
give rise to events such as the Iraq war. By his account, the exception was
Salman Rushdie, until the novelist changed from “remorseless satirist of the
West to cheering on its criminal adventures in Iraq and Afghanistan”.
Eagleton charges that his former Cambridge student, the playwright David Hare,
has “caved in to the blandishments of Buckingham Palace . . . moving from
radical to reformist”. And the polemicist Christopher Hitchens, “who looked
set to become the George Orwell de nos jours, is likely to be remembered as
our Evelyn Waugh, having thrown in his lot with Washington’s neocons”. Oof!
Fighting talk, but some detect a mellowing of the former firebrand. He prefers
to call himself a socialist these days and defends the study of religion.
“There is the old Joycean question of how far you can walk away from
something culturally imprinted in you so deeply,” he reflected. Age has not
slowed his output of at least one book a year. He has written a novel, and
his play about Oscar Wilde, Saint Oscar, was made into a film with Stephen
Rea. He once confessed to feeling embarrassment at colleagues’ difficulty in
writing: “Instead of finding myself unable to write books, I find myself
unable to stop.”
Even to his admirers, Eagleton’s beliefs are hard to pin down. “There is a sense that Terry is the great antitheorist,” said one. “What he works
towards is a political criticism that exposes the hollowness and irrelevance
of a lot of critical theory.” Eagleton has remarked that he was able to move
freely from Catholicism to Marxism “without having to pass through
liberalism”.
Like Forrest Gump, he seems to have been present at all the key academic
phases of the past 40 years. A third-generation Irish immigrant, he was born
in Salford, near Manchester, into a family that was poor and “socially
sophisticated enough to be conscious of their inferiority”. Both his
grandfathers had been employed in the gasworks and his father, after winning
a grammar school place, opted to work in heavy engineering.
Asthmatic and the only boy with a coat at primary school, Eagleton was bullied
at a grammar school run by the De La Salle brotherhood and served as an
altar boy at the local Carmelite convent, with thoughts of becoming a
priest. The Catholic bishop, he recalled in his 2001 memoir The Gatekeeper,
had “the walk of a navvy and the face of a wino”. His schoolfellows were “a
spindly, stunted, hollow-chested crew, like a chorus line from Les
Misérables”.
He won a scholarship to Cambridge despite being yanked out of the entrance
exams with the news that his father had died. “I was furious,” he said.
“What my father would have wanted was for me to stay on and take the exams.”
He arrived at Cambridge as a committed socialist and a member of CND.
Although Trinity was a rich college, Eagleton “fitted it like a glove”,
according to a contemporary.
While on a visit to Manchester during his first year as an undergraduate, he
met Rosemary Galpin, a state-registered nurse working as a health visitor.
They married in 1966 and had two children, Dominic and Daniel. The couple
divorced in 1976 and he then embarked on a 10-year relationship with Toril
Moi, a Norwegian feminist critic. In 1997 he married Willa Murphy, an
American academic, with whom he had a son, Oliver.
As an undergraduate Eagleton came under the influence of the leading left-wing
critic Raymond Williams, who offered him a research fellowship at Jesus
College. Insecure intellectually, he became a heavy drinker before stopping
13 years ago. (“Giving up smoking was much more difficult.”) At high table
he encountered only “doddering, quasi-fascistic clergymen, who talked of
Gladstone’s Irish home rule bill as though it could still be headed off”.
So he took a job at Oxford, which was “rather like taking refuge from
insincerity in Hollywood”. It took 22 years at Oxford until he was deemed
safe. “My strategy for survival was to put distance between myself and the
Oxford establishment.”
Whereas Eagleton preferred to focus on the relationship between literature and
the culture from which it grows, English teaching at Oxford had been based
on textual analysis. His weekly seminars, a focus for dissidents, increased
suspicions. “They thought it was a threat to all they held precious. But I
think the students I taught found it enormously enriching.” One recalled:
“He was very charismatic and used to bang on about the class war. He was
embedded in a previous age.”
Tariq Ali, a friend of more than 30 years, says he led a double existence. “He
was one of the lads in the pub with the comrades and was wonderfully good at
singing and writing songs. But then he’d go off and be a cult literary
theorist. To his credit, he always tried to bring his worlds together.”
His star rose throughout the 1970s. “The left was in the ascendant and there
was a sense we might break through,” he believed. The publication in 1983 of
his most famous book, Literary Theory: An Introduction, made him an
international star. Finally in 1991 the dons relented and made him Warton
professor of English literature in succession to John Bayley. Typically, his
enemies noted, he slagged off Bayley in his inaugural lecture.
Eagleton used to be known as the closest thing to the Sex Pistols in British
scholarship. With his attack on Amis he proves he can still spit with the
best of them.
