Stefan Collini is a Professor of Intellectual History and English Literature in the University of Cambridge. This twofold title is somewhat misleading, since in most of his writing it is the intellectual historian who predominates. But in his latest book, literature as the term is most widely understood comes to the fore.

Common Reading consists of essays on fifteen writers – all of them active in the middle years of the twentieth century, all but one of them British – along with a smaller group of pieces on miscellaneous cultural themes. Of the authors discussed in detail, eight wrote fiction, poetry, or criticism. (The remainder were historians and social or political commentators.) Most of the general pieces in the second half of the book are broadly literary, too: they include reflections on biography, criticism, working-class readers and “the author” – the late Victorian or Edwardian author – “as celebrity”.

At the same time, Collini’s account of the principal writers with whom he deals is much more sharply focused than a simple roll call of names would suggest. He is primarily concerned with them, in his own words, “as essayists, reviewers, and contributors to general cultural and literary discussion”. Thus there are chapters on Aldous Huxley and V. S. Pritchett, but Huxley’s novels and Pritchett’s short stories receive no more than a bare mention. William Empson and Stephen Spender are considered at some length, but their poems are pretty much passed over in silence. We hear a lot about Rebecca West’s literary journalism, but very little about her travel writing and reportage.

If this is a narrow approach, it has the compensation of being a coherent one. And in his introduction Collini goes further, laying claim to a consistent critical position. Some people might suppose, he warns us, that as an essayist himself he laments the passing of the largely non-academic literary world which he discusses. Far from it: “I do not write out of any nostalgia for the circumstances in which these authors worked, nor do I attend to their achievements as a way of underwriting a jeremiad about the sorry state of the present”. His own essays “must earn their keep on their own terms, not on the back of some misplaced fantasy about re-creating the role of ‘the man of letters’ in the twenty-first century”.

In the case studies which follow, the myth (or alleged myth) of the man of letters is mostly rejected by implication, but at a number of points it comes in for an explicit drubbing. A particularly sustained example occurs at the beginning of the essay on Edmund Wilson (the one non-British author among Collini’s subjects). The first thing we are told about Wilson, which sets the tone for most of what follows, is that he has become “an object of fantasy”, an “icon” created by the need to believe that there was once a golden age of “wide-ranging readable critics” addressing themselves to “Common Readers”. Like many polemicists, Collini is inclined to exaggerate the strength of the enemy. It may be true, for example, that Cyril Connolly lends himself to “nostalgic celebrations of ‘the last of the men of letters’”, but Collini also asks us to believe that in recent years this has helped to make him “the sort of figure whom trade publishers just love” – that at the sound of his name they fantasize about flocks of readers rising up “like rooks from a field”. This is not a picture of the contemporary publishing scene that everyone will recognize.

One can sympathize, up to a point, with the irritation which underlies such fancies. Attempts to enthrone the man of letters as a literary ideal can be superficial or self-serving. There is room for a fresh look at the whole tradition. But any reassessment, if it is to win worthwhile converts, needs to be conducted in a less partisan spirit than Collini shows.

In some respects he can be actively misleading. He has no qualms about informing us, for instance, that Edmund Wilson “really does seem to have detested what he identified as the academic spirit”. In fact, Wilson often wrote warmly about academics whose work he admired. He praised figures as different as J. Dover Wilson and Newton Arvin, and he always cited as his principal literary mentor not some journalistic predecessor but his old Princeton teacher Christian Gauss. What is even more wide of the mark, however, is the example Collini gives of the wanton persecution of academics in which he claims Wilson indulged:

"His late squib against the professors, The Fruits of the MLA (1968), was not just an idiosyncratic contribution to what has become the rather tiresome ritual of MLA-bashing in the American press; it was also a calculated deployment of his considerable standing to stoke the ever-smouldering fires of middlebrow prejudice. "

“Squib” is exactly the wrong word for Wilson’s pamphlet. Originally published in the New York Review of Books (not the most obvious place to choose for whipping up middlebrow prejudice), it is a fierce attack, often scornful but always serious, on the editorial policies adopted by the Modern Language Association in their publicly funded editions of American classics. It argues its case closely, and its plea for better things ultimately paved the way for one of the most valuable publishing ventures of recent times, the Library of America. As for aligning Wilson with subsequent criticisms of the MLA, it is a red herring. Those criticisms have been made by other people, and they concern other issues. That doesn’t mean that they may not often have been well-founded. They certainly don’t deserve to be brushed aside en masse with the lordly adjective “tiresome”. But the most important point in this context is that they have nothing to do with Wilson.

Mostly, it must be said, Collini does much better than this. His account of his chosen authors is never less than lively, and he makes some shrewd points about them – about the preoccupation with questions of critical authority which fuelled Rebecca West’s resentment of T. S. Eliot, for instance, or about V. S. Pritchett’s tendency to pile on the eccentricity of the characters in his memoirs. He has a keen awareness of the mechanics of the literary profession, too – of writers’ working habits, their earning power, their social networks, their sense of status. One thing remains in short supply, however. We are told a good deal about the way in which the role of man of letters was embodied by this or that writer, but relatively little about the way in which the role was discharged – about the actual substance of the critical writing in question. Pritchett is a case in point. Collini pays his respects to his criticism, but there is only the most perfunctory attempt to analyse its appeal or bring out its distinctive qualities. Aldous Huxley fares even worse: virtually all we learn about his essays, apart from the range of topics they cover, is that “they can easily seem mannered or vacuous”. Not everyone will share this low estimate. But whatever Collini thinks of them, he surely owes it to us, given his general agenda, to say a bit more. And it isn’t only in the essays that Huxley served his time as a man of letters. There are other aspects of his work which go unmentioned but which would have been worth considering – his anthology Texts and Pretexts, for instance, or his editing of D. H. Lawrence’s letters.

All the studies of individual authors in Common Reading began life as reviews, mostly of biographies or of collections of correspondence. This has inevitably helped to shape them, and it naturally means that they don’t allow Collini as much scope for exploring the legend (or the reality) of the man of letters as he would have had in a book specifically designed for the purpose. A notable casualty in this respect is the essay on Orwell, which is the thinnest in the book in literary terms – partly, at least, because unlike the others it involves Collini having to deal with two new biographies (Gordon Bowker’s and D. J. Taylor’s) rather than just one.

Whether or not this is the only explanation, a valuable opportunity has been lost, since some of Orwell’s work would lend itself particularly well to a discussion of the varieties of criticism. Think how much could be made in the right hands, for instance, of a comparison between his essay on Dickens and the approach of other Dickens critics – both the academics and, for want of a better word, the amateurs. But as it is, there is nothing about his literary essays (or any of his essays) in Collini’s piece. Instead, attention is heavily concentrated on the problems of writing his biography; and the chief lesson many readers are likely to take away – the one enforced most strongly – is how much Collini admires the 1980 Life by Bernard Crick. He praises it highly on a number of grounds, but in particular because he believes that Crick (a Professor of Politics) displays such a sure grasp of Orwell as a political writer.

Crick’s book has its undeniable solid virtues. But there is more room for debate than Collini allows, both about its literary merits (just because it is deliberately pedestrian doesn’t mean that pedestrianism isn’t a limitation) and about its political emphases. When he comes to Nineteen Eighty-four, for instance, Crick rightly insists that Orwell set out to attack every kind of totalitarianism, both left-wing and right-wing, both actual and potential. But in doing so he manages to play down the fact that the book’s immediate thrust was nonetheless primarily directed against Communism. As Robert Conquest has written, “the Stalin regime is present in its pages with great specificity”.

It may seem odd that Collini shouldn’t at any rate pause to consider such a point, but it is less puzzling after one has read his essay on E. H. Carr. During the Second World War, Carr, who had favoured accommodation with Nazi Germany in the 1930s, became known for the sharply pro-Soviet views of his leaders in The Times. (They foreshadowed his Stalinizing History of Soviet Russia.) These articles, as Collini explains, incurred a lot of criticism at the time, not only from the Right but from the Left as well: “Orwell, in one of his rants about ‘the general Russophile feeling of the intelligentsia’, sneered that ‘all the appeasers, e.g. Professor E. H. Carr, have switched their allegiance from Hitler to Stalin’”. This is an interesting attempt to discredit Orwell without quite claiming that he was wrong.

Collini himself doesn’t approve of Carr’s more objectionable views, it is just that he doesn’t spend much time disapproving of them. Moving on from such issues as the forced collectivization of Soviet agriculture as quickly as he can, he prefers to concentrate instead on what he sees as a recurrent but neglected motif of Carr’s later years. It has been insufficiently recognized, he argues, that while Carr may have criticized intellectuals in the West for their conservatism and pessimism, in the very act of doing so he revealed “a certain unclarity or tension in his conception of intellectuals and, more significantly, a betraying unsteadiness about where he placed himself within this vexed category”. Half a dozen pages are devoted to this momentous theme.

The outburst about Orwell’s ranting and sneering is not an isolated aberration. In his essay on William Empson, for instance, Collini suggests that “one index of Empson’s sound political instincts was the way he got Encounter’s number from the start; as he remarked in 1967: ‘Ever since Encounter was founded, I have noticed that its political contributors have great difficulty in opening their mouths without a lie popping out’”. Collini, it should be stressed, doesn’t just commend this judgement for its fighting spirit, or something of the kind – he singles it out for its soundness. Which makes one wonder which of Encounter’s political contributors he had in mind. Andrei Sinyavsky, Václav Havel, Raymond Aron, Leonard Schapiro, Simon Leys, Golo Mann . . . Are these and dozens like them really his idea of hardened liars?

His own political views are apparent throughout Common Reading. Indeed, although he doesn’t announce the fact in the introduction, they provide a more consistent unifying theme than the to-do about men of letters. And at his best – when he discusses the ramifications of class, for instance – his arguments have a trenchancy which even opponents can respect. All too often, however, he succumbs to the pleasures of dishing out abuse or dismissing opinions with which he disagrees as delusions. After quoting Roger Scruton’s assertion that the BBC is “now devoted to abolishing what remains of the national culture”, the only comment he is moved to make is, “And it sends little green men into your drawing rooms, too”. As a response this might just about do if it came from Greg Dyke, shall we say, but from a professor of intellectual history we expect rather more – an acknowledgement, for example, that even if Scruton’s remark is intemperate, it points to a real problem.

The most extraordinary piece in Common Reading is an impassioned celebration of Perry Anderson of New Left Review. Its effusiveness is all the more striking given that Collini rather prides himself on his severity. The first of the epigraphs he has chosen for the book is a quotation from a letter in which Henry James proclaims that he is “damned critical – for it’s the only thing to be”. (There’s an echo here, possibly unintentional, of F. R. Leavis’s choice of two comparable passages from James as epigraphs for his collection The Common Pursuit.)

One of the key terms Collini uses for describing Anderson is “Olympian”. Another is “magisterial”. (“If one attends to its definition – ‘having the bearing of a master, invested with authority’ – then the aura of omnicompetent grandeur about Anderson’s writing makes the term irresistible.”) As for the secondary adjectives or phrases of commendation which he bestows, they include dazzling, delicate, heartening, inspiring, coruscating, unyielding, bracingly distinctive, enviably resilient. And the catalogue goes on: just when you think there are no more flowers left to pluck, he comes up with another bunch. Yet a word list alone can’t convey how skilfully he has mastered the art of adulation. He registers a few reservations, but they are always swallowed up by fresh praise; his potentially damaging account of the more pretentious aspects of Anderson’s vocabulary, for instance, somehow ends up as a renewed appreciation of the writer’s Olympian qualities which would be a mite excessive applied to Goethe.

While the essay plainly tells one a good deal about Collini’s basic values, it isn’t a political testament. He doesn’t necessarily endorse Anderson’s specific opinions; what he primarily admires is his intellectual style. He’s enthralled by the tough stuff.

To move on from this to the general essays in the latter part of the book is to experience a certain drop in temperature. The tone is less exalted and more reasonable – and the results are more rewarding. There’s a well-rounded discussion of the working-class autodidact tradition (essentially a review of Jonathan Rose’s excellent book on the subject). An otherwise admirable account of The Oxford Dictionary of National Biography is perhaps a shade too chummy (“I feel no inclination to ‘nag’”), but to compensate for this there is a hilarious excursion of several pages in which Collini recounts his adventures tapping selected phrases into the ODNB’s online search engine – “forceful personality”, for example, or “insufferable bore” – and seeing what comes up. He has virtually invented a new computer game.

At one point the temperature drops a little too far. In the opening section of a chapter on biography, Collini complains about the limitations of literary or intellectual biography as conventionally practised. Some biographers do better than others, but “the unbroken narrative of a single life” – what he also calls “the individualistic form of biography” – is not the ideal framework for analysing cultural achievements and relating them to a social milieu.

One can recognize the problem and still feel that he formulates it in too one-sided a fashion. His enthusiasm is overwhelmingly reserved for the analytic intellectual portrait. In comparison, his acceptance of the need for conventional biographies comes across – setting aside one or two exceptions – as tepid and reluctant. It even seems to irk him that such biographies are expected to be “readable” (the quotation marks are his). And “the individualistic form of biography” is a rather chilly phrase. There’s nothing about it to suggest that the celebration of individuality might be a major virtue – at its best, one of biography’s great glories.

Men of letters flourish in a climate of individualism, too. Although it is something he acknowledges intermittently, Collini doesn’t allow enough for the extent to which they depend for their effect – the ones who make a lasting impression, at least – on force of personality. That means in turn that they can get away with things which professional scholars and teachers couldn’t. A professor of American literature who wrote an 800-page study of the literature of the Civil War and devoted only half a dozen pages to Walt Whitman, as Edmund Wilson did in Patriotic Gore, could expect some rough handling from colleagues and reviewers. It was no virtue in Wilson to write so little about Whitman, but Patriotic Gore remains one of his most highly regarded books. Readers don’t go to Edmund Wilson because they are looking for comprehensive and balanced treatment of a subject, but because of his liveliness, his narrative skills, his range of reference, his intelligence, his crotchets and a dozen other qualities which make his responses more interesting than those of most other people.

Still, to be forever pitting academia (by now very large) against a freelance literary world (by now much depleted) is a wasteful conflict. The differences are real enough, but what is more important is that man-of-letterish qualities can and do survive in the university, and sometimes even flourish there. If Stefan Collini picks up the story again in another book, “The Academic as Man of Letters” would make a good starting point.

Stefan Collini
COMMON READING
Critics, historians, publics
368pp. Oxford University Press. £25.
9780199296781

John Gross's books include A Double Thread: A childhood in Mile End - and beyond, 2001, and After Shakespeare: Writing inspired by the world's greatest author, 2002.

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